There are some questions left here; if I invite ten people for a group, it doesn't seem as though there's much to stop them from adding ten friends, and those ten friends to invite ten friends, and so on. The answer seems to be that common sense will save the day, since no one wants to be on a 250 person email list. You can also change your notification settings within a group to adjust how that group can notify you.

Advertisement

Groups themselves also have privacy settings—they can be open groups, meaning their information is public; closed groups, meaning that it's not, and secret, meaning that no one can see who is in a group or that it exists.

Despite the questions, though Zuckerberg sees an 80% adoption rate "over time." If you're among that 80%, get ready for a quick landgrab for group names. While you can call your group "Family," for example, there's only one unique address on Facebook for a group with that name. So once BarrettFamily and Barrett_Family are gone, I'm basically going to give up on keeping in touch with my relatives. Sorry, folks!

Advertisement

Hard to make a judgment call on Groups until actually, you know, using it, but at first blush it seems promising. Better living through categorizing my acquaintances! Then again, most of my social circles have at least one Facebook holdout—which is partly what Zuckerberg is banking on. Either a Group forgoes the convenience of Facebook for the uninitiated, or the uninitiated cracks down and joins the network. If Facebook wins even half those battles, that potentially a huge amount of growth.