Facebook for Un-Social Groups

Facebook usage in Hong Kong has almost quadrupled in the last month. Or at least the Facebook Hong Kong network has. Perhaps, as Yusuf mentions, it’s just a fad. But even as a fad, the rise of Facebook here correlates with an increasing number of web focused get togethers.

I’ve been surprised to find myself logging into Facebook almost daily now. Mostly I go to check the discussions on several groups such as the Hong Kong Barcamp, Hong Kong Bloggers, Web Wednesday, and the Hong Kong Eclipse Developers groups. But here’s the problem—those links are worthless. That is, unless you have a Facebook account.

All those groups are cut off from the rest of the internet, hidden behind a Facebook login. Facebook makes groups incredibly easy to create, join and promote, which makes them very alluring to an organizer. However, these communities are artificially limited to the internal audience. To the wider public, group discussions and events are non-existant. To get the word out, the organizers have to duplicate the effort of promotion—within the Facebook community and without on the wider public internet. Once a group becomes established in Facebook and decides to move beyond the walled garden, then the discussion is immediately forked between public and private forums.

And that’s just the crux of the issue—Facebook groups are ultimately private. Not everyone wants to or should be required to have a Facebook account to join in a public discussion. The discussions and details are invisible to search engines and worse yet, invisible to links, the very substance of the internet.

All that said, I have seen Facebook groups prove useful in organizing small events and finding like-minded people in an area. They obviously work in a way that Yahoo! or Google groups don’t, mostly I believe by (once you’ve got that Facebook account) lowering the barrier to entry and mapping the relationships between groups and individuals. This last part is perhaps the key. I’ve found several of the Facebook groups I monitor not by directly searching for them, but by seeing what other groups my friends are in. Of course, that’s a feature I can imagine many not wanting to see on public groups. Do you really want to know what other groups the subscribers to "alt.emacs.religion":http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.emacs/topics are in?