Creating Facebook Groups & Downloading Personal Data – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Facebook is one of the very few internet behemoths that doesn’t hesitate to add new features and update existing ones at a rapid pace. In the last few days, Facebook has completely revamped their groups product and now they allow users to download all their profile data. Exporting personal data is clearly aimed at pacifying privacy advocates and is a welcome change in Facebook’s approach.

Previously less highlighted groups feature is now tightly integrated with user profile and friends list. Today we’ll take a look at how to set up a revamped Facebook group and to export your personal data.

Overview

The primary goal of Facebook groups is to be a simple and private way to communicate with family members or a select group of friends. That’s not all; there are a number of ways one can put Facebook groups to use – say online collaboration, personal social network ala. Ning (in a smaller scale), event organizing committee and so on. If you are looking to socialize and network with people around a particular topic, idea or community, Facebook is the right choice.

Groups vs Pages

In a nutshell, Facebook groups is only for personal use and cannot be used by brands. If you are a brand owner, you might still go ahead and create a public Facebook group of your brand to take advantages of features like group chat, document sharing etc. However, that group will still be a separate entity and will not add any value to the conversations happening in your Facebook Page. So, while anyone can create a Facebook group, it is ultimately designed with individuals in mind.

Creating a Group

Select the Create Group option from the left pane to kick start the process. Give the group a name and select how open you want the group to be. If you select open, members and content are completely visible to public and the closed option makes content private but members will still remain public. Now, if you are planning to start a really clandestine and underground group, choose private and both member names and the content is visible only to those in the group.

Facebook Group

In all the three cases, users cannot join the group willy nilly. You are the boss and you can choose who is admitted into the Elite club. Start typing the names and you can select the names from the Facebook friends list. That’s all you will have to do and the group is set up automatically.

To change the icon of the Facebook Group, use the drop down adjacent to the icon or click on it.

Adding Content

Creating a Post

Adding content to a group is much easier and more intuitive than in comparison to brand Pages or the personal page. Links to add an image, post, link, event or video is displayed prominently and all the members can start posting content once the group has been created.

Creating a Document

Adding a document works in a different way than we expected. I thought we would be uploading documents, but Facebook lets you create one from this link. There aren’t many features to speak of but there are options to bold & italicize text apart from bullets and numbering. Members can also view the revision history of the documents they are accessing. Looks like Facebook will create its own full blown documents suite like Google Documents or Microsoft 365 in the future.

Group Features

Notifications

All wall posts are intimated to the members via group notifications so that they can comeback to the group to access the information. If users find the notifications to be annoying, they can opt out of the feature altogether. As the creator of the group, you do not have control over the opt out decision of your members.

Another interesting feature is the group chat. There is absolutely no need to ping members with email invitations before starting a chat. Just click on the group chat option and you can chat with all the members who are online immediately. Members can also join the chat even if they login after the chat begins. Consider this to be like the chat rooms in Yahoo or IRC except that there are no creepy strangers pushing malware. The downside of this feature is that you cannot kick members out if they get too noisy or rude.

Downloading Personal Data

Downloading Information

Facebook download tool lets you download a copy of all the information shared in your profile, including your photos and videos, posts on your wall, all of your messages, your friend list and other content you have shared on your profile. You can initiate the data download process from the Account Settings page. The download isn’t instantaneous and once your request is received, Facebook will put everything together and will mail you when it is ready for download.

The downloaded data is in a zipped archived and comes with a HTML file that pretty much works as a webpage. You will have all your photos, links, updates etc. in a fantastically packaged format. You can upload the contents to your web server and have a great personal page courtesy of Facebook. However, it does take an awful lot of time to get the download ready email link from Facebook.

Final Thoughts

Facebook Groups offers a more streamlined way of creating cliques and personal social networks. Just like Twitter lists, Facebook Groups help define your taste and personality. It is also a great idea on part of Facebook to showcase the groups you are member of on the sidebar.

Coming to data download, it is the same Facebook which once said all user uploaded data is theirs. The ability to download data is a clear indication that Facebook listens to public opinion and they don’t want to give undue publicity to the upcoming opensource distributed social network Diaspora. However, unless Diaspora or a rival social network finds a way to import the Facebook data and get all your connections back again, there is no point in downloading all those status updates & funny video clip links.