Facebook Creates 'Groups' Feature; Changes Way Users Share

Oct. 6, 2010— -- Facebook today announced that it will change the way users share information on the site, through a new "group" feature which will allow users to separate the way they share items with groups like co-workers, family and high school friends.

"Right now we've made it easy to share with everybody or just with your friends. But in reality, sharing with just your friends really isn't private," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a media briefing at the company's California headquarters.

In addition to the groups feature, Facebook also announced a new feature that allows users to download all the information they have chosen to post on Facebook.

Facebook already allows users to create various types of lists to sort what they share, but Zuckerberg said only 5 percent of users have bothered to do so, and most have only created one list.

The new group feature gets around that problem by letting anybody add someone to a group. Zuckerberg said it would be similar to the photo tagging feature, in which all users can tag someone in a photo. Not every Facebook user posts images to the site, but he said 95 percent of users have a photo of themselves that they let friends tag.

Just like the photo functionality, the group feature will allow people to create a group and add people to it without the others having to do that work. The feature is aimed at replacing the "friend list" feature, which will remain for those 5 percent who have spent all the time creating the lists.

Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old billionaire who founded Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004, took to the stage in a gray T-shirt just a few days after The Social Network," an unauthorized movie focusing on him and Facebook's founding hit national theaters.

The movie depicts him as a girl-crazy computer nerd desperate to gain access to the university's refined and exclusive social clubs.

In a cafeteria-like setting, Zuckerberg appeared relaxed as he described the new products and then took questions from technology reporters and bloggers in the room.