It's always been easy to share with all your friends on Facebook, but until we introduced Groups last October, there wasn't a simple way to share with just a few people. Much of what we share in our daily lives is only meaningful to smaller groups of people, like our family, roommates, or co-workers. With Groups, you can create a private space to share with just those friends.

In the six months since our launch, people have created over 50 million Groups on Facebook. It's grown quickly because of its social design. Instead of making everyone build and manage individual friend lists, one person can create a group for their families and everyone in the family gets to use it.

We've received some great feedback about how people are using Groups and what new features they would like to see. Today, we're happy to announce some new improvements, including integration with Questions, the ability to upload photo albums, and additional membership controls.

How people are using Groups

People are using Groups to communicate with many of the important communities in their lives, like their families, best friends, and teammates. My own family uses a group to stay connected to each other. As a Californian with a brother living in Peru and parents back in Wisconsin, we use our group to update each other about our lives, share vacation photos, and discuss where we're going to meet up next.

I also have a group with my roommates. Because we have such different schedules, we can go a whole week without seeing each other in person. Our group is where we meet to divide up chores, settle our bills, and make plans for the weekend.

Popular group names among college students 19-22 years old (larger words represent greater popularity).

Popular group names among people 60-75 years old.

New improvements to Groups

You've always been able to post updates to Groups, but now you can post questions and polls for only members to weigh in on. You'll get quick responses to questions like "What movie should we see?" and "When should we should hold our next soccer practice?"

Where before you could only upload individual photos, now you have the option to upload entire albums directly to your group, making it even easier to share your photos with the people who most want to see them.

For group owners, we're also adding a control that lets you approve people before they are added to the group.

For people who were using our older version of Groups, we've created a tool that makes it easy to upgrade to the new Groups format. Owners and members of old Groups will be receiving information about how to upgrade within the coming weeks.

Send button lets you share with Groups

In addition to the other new group features, we're also introducing the Send button.

A year ago, we launched the Like button, which gives you a quick way to share the things you find on the web with all your friends. But there are times when you find something that you only want to share with a few specific people.

Say you're on Orbitz and want to tell your roommates about a great idea for a summer vacation, or you come across a Huffington Post article that you only want to share with people at work. With the new Send button, now you can share things with any of your Groups or individual friends on Facebook.

Starting today, the Send button will be available on over 50 leading websites, and it will appear in more places soon.

 

Create a Group today

It's been exciting to hear about the many ways people have been using Groups to communicate with the different people in their lives, and we hope you all enjoy the new features, which will be rolling out over the next few days.

Ready to start a new group? Visit www.facebook.com/groups.

 <object width=400 height=224><param name=allowfullscreen value=true></param><param name=movie value="http://www.facebook.com/v/823497472303"></param><embed src="http://www.facebook.com/v/823497472303" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen=true width=400 height=224></embed></object>

Share

Safety has always been a social experience: as friends and family, we look out for each other and pass along advice to help each other stay safe. Safety on Facebook works the same way. By keeping each other informed, people make Facebook a more trusted environment. Today, we're making it easier to stay safe with the launch of new safety resources, tools for reporting issues and additional security features.

More Resources for Families

During President Obama's White House Conference on Bullying Prevention last month, we announced plans to expand our existing safety resources with new content for families. Beginning today, you can visit the newly redesigned Family Safety Center. There, you'll find useful articles for parents and teens and videos on safety and privacy, as well as many other resources. In the coming weeks, we'll also be providing a free, downloadable guide for teachers, written by safety experts Linda Fogg Phillips, B.J. Fogg and Derek Baird. We hope this guide will help educators with social media in the classroom.

Social Reporting Tools

We also recently unveiled a new social reporting tool that allows people to notify a member of their community, in addition to Facebook, when they see something they don't like. Safety and child psychology experts tell us that online issues are frequently a reflection of what is happening offline. By encouraging people to seek help from friends, we hope that many of these situations can be resolved face to face. The impact has been encouraging, and we're now expanding social reporting to other major sections of Facebook, including Profiles, Pages and Groups.

Advanced Security Features

We're also starting to introduce Two Factor Authentication, a new feature to help prevent unauthorized access to your account. If you turn this new feature on, we'll ask you to enter a code anytime you try to log into Facebook from a new device. This additional security helps confirm that it's really you trying to log in.

We announced earlier this year that people could experience Facebook over a secure connection using HTTPS. This feature helps protect your personal information and is particularly useful if you're uncertain about the security of your network or you're using public wifi to access Facebook. Today, we're improving HTTPS so if you start using a non-HTTPS application on Facebook, we automatically switch your session back to HTTPS when you're finished.

We think that social solutions to safety will become increasingly important to using the web. Tools like social reporting will help make our community even stronger, and we encourage you to use them.

Share

Friends are often the best source of advice when you're trying new things: Where should I go to dinner? How do I go buy a car? What new music should I check out? Friends know your tastes, and you have confidence in their opinions.

Like many of our products, Questions originated as people began using Facebook in a new and unexpected way. People would update their status with a question, and their friends would answer in the comments. We saw this and began thinking about how we could make this interaction more useful. Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone.

We noticed that people were frequently asking for opinions ("what are your favorite restaurants in New York?") or hoping to learn about their friends ("what was your favorite movie as a kid, something you watched over and over?"). For most of these questions, experts weren't going to be the best source for advice. The answers to these questions are meaningful or interesting because you know your friends and your friends know you.

We wanted to make questions easier and faster to answer. With the updated Questions you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response. This makes it easy for many more people to respond to you. It also helps us show you the most popular responses.

Quickly get answers to your questions.

Questions will also enable you to cast a wider net. Now, when your friends answer one of your questions, their friends can answer it too. For more unusual questions, you can get advice from a broader group of people, but to keep it most relevant we filter the answers to show you first what your friends think. You can see more responses by clicking "others" within the question.

Questions will be available to everyone soon, but you can try it now here and learn more.

Share