During my PhD studies, I built rhub, a system designed for group-oriented social communication and sharing. This week, Facebook has rolled out its new groups feature, which is similar in spirit to rhub’s groups – small groups of people you actually interact with off the internet. It’s also opt-out, like rhub’s groups, stemming from the observation that people are inherently lazy and would rather adapt behaviour than configure or maintain settings. That said, within a group, there are always people that are the hubs, that bring people together, that organise and so forth. Allowing them to create a group and add people means that everyone benefits. Organisers can organise, lazy people can be lazy. Sure, there’ll be people adding others to groups they didn’t want to, but it’s pretty simple to add some controls to curb this behaviour.
I am sure that the designers at Facebook are entirely unaware of rhub, but it’s nice to see rhub’s design validated at such a scale. I’m not sure how far they’ll take the group messaging aspect of the system, but for rhub at least, that was by far the most popular option – pervasive contact with a small social group.
group messaging is the missing aspect of so many app’s
— ann morrison · Oct 9, 11:14 AM · #
Agreed. Consider also Delicious, which people often hack to use within a group (i.e., sharing a single login). Groups are more effort, really. Socio-technical systems aren’t quite there yet when it comes to supporting dynamic and subtle notions of groups.
— Clint · Oct 9, 01:55 PM · #