In your years of being on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed a decent amount of updates: new layouts, addition of applications, Facebook Chat,  Places, etc. The most recent change to Facebook was the new Groups feature.

As far as social networking goes, this new addition is an improvement in terms of efficiency. One of my favorite functions of the new Groups is the ability for members to “share” things within the group: e.g., documents (not just photos like before).

Another great aspect of the new Groups is that, instead of showing comments chronologically, they are shown based on how hot the topic is. For example, if someone writes “who wants to go to the movies tonight” and then someone else writes “I like jello,” and Tim, Mary, and John comment on the movie post, that post will be shown at the top of the stream of comments, even though it was technically posted before the jello comment. Make sense? This is helpful because topics that are more popular stay at the top of the stream, whereas those that people don’t care about fall further down.

While it may take a little getting used to, the new Groups feature will be a helpful aide to people who wish to use it as a means of communication and organization. It’s more sophisticated than the previous Groups, and seems to be more user-friendly.

Are you a member of an organization on campus? In what ways do your groups communicate: solely via listserves or do you use an outside medium?