Facebook continues with its unbundling strategy, with the fifth and latest Facebook feature to get the standalone treatment being Groups.
Since Nov. 18, Groups has been spun off as a separate mobile app for iOS and Android users and makes it easier for people who like to access their groups but found the method is quite lengthy and burdensome on the main Facebook app. With the new Groups app, the roughly 700 million Facebook users who are active on Groups every month can now enjoy a simpler, faster and better experience on mobile.
The app, which is available as a free download, works pretty much the same as the Groups feature. This time, however, users can access their groups right from their phone's home screen, allowing them to communicate privately and regularly with certain groups of people, such as family, friends and custom groups based on their interests.
The main page provides a clutter-free view of all a user's groups, with notifications appearing for each group to show how many updates were posted from the last visit. The most frequently used groups go to the top of the list and less used ones go below the fold. The app also includes a new Discovery section that lets users explore other groups to join based on their active groups, interests and friends.
Inside a group itself, the interface is clean, intuitive and mobile-friendly. It's no different from the main Facebook News Feed in how it looks but it lets users share status updates, photos, comments and other posts with a certain group of people and view other group members' posts as they were posted, instead of the curated posts on the News Feed that Facebook tweaked to include things such as advertisements and viral content.
Speaking of advertisements, Groups is completely ad-free, at least for now. Facebook product manager for Groups Shirley Sun says the Groups app team "focused on experience without considering a monetization end goal." That should sound good for many who are irritated by the ubiquity of ads on the main News Feed, although there is no guarantee that Facebook will not monetize Groups in the long run.
Facebook CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, hinted at the creation of a standalone Groups app in an interview with TechCrunch's Josh Constine at Facebook's Internal Mobile Dev Day in 2012.
"If you have something like Groups, it's always going to be kind of second-class in the main Facebook app, or even messaging for that matter," he said at the time. "In order to make these things really be able to reach their full potential, I do think over time we're going to have to create more specific experiences."
Facebook has always tried to let people post specific content on the News Feed that is visible only to certain people, but the confusing friends list feature never caught on. There was always the chance to accidentally post content to other people who were not meant to see the post.
When Facebook launched Messenger as a standalone messaging app, the social networked irked many users who said they didn't want to switch back and forth from the main app to Messenger to chat with their Facebook friends. Groups, however, won't be removed from the main app, but it will still be buried four interactions deep and won't be as mobile-friendly as the app.
With the Groups app veering off from the main Facebook app, users could have a chance at going back to the Facebook of old, one where users communicate only with people they want to without the specter of seeing posts from people, pages and advertisers that Facebook thinks users want to see.
Groups is a standalone app developed by Facebook's Creative Labs, which is also responsible for creating other apps of mixed successes, such as Paper and Slingshot.
