This is a guest blog post from Heather O Sullivan:

New Groups May Significantly Change the Way You Use Facebook

After a 60 day lockdown at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, big changes to the social network were announced today.

As always, I will break them down as simply (and non-techy) as possible.

There are 3 Changes:

1. A new dashboard to help you better control your privacy, monitor the applications that you have given access to, as well as those sites that you have given permissions to via facebook connect (ie using the ‘like button’ on websites)

2. You can now download all of your ‘stuff’. As Mark Zuckerberg pointed out, what you post on facebook ‘is yours’, and now you can download it. This is especially powerful (in my opinion) for pictures. I frequently upload pictures via my phone, and now I can easily pull them out of facebook. (No word yet on the supported formats, etc).

3. This is ‘the BIG ONE!’

Facebook Groups have not just gotten a makeover, they have just gotten a whole new identity! Say good-by to friend lists, and to groups as we used to know them.

In order to avoid ‘overwhelm’, this post will focus on #3 as it is such a big change in the overall experience and will create a radical shift in how you use facebook (as well as probably bringing folks onboard the FB train that weren’t before).

If you are thinking “oh great, I had a group, then moved to a fan page, then it became a ‘like’ page and now I have to move back???”

Relax, and no you don’t 

New Facebook Groups are very different from old groups, or ‘pages’.

They are more like a hybrid of friend lists + the old groups on steroids.

What New Groups are:

• The new groups will be created by users to ‘group together’ people by whatever parameters or context they choose.
• You can create a family group, work friends group, project group, etc.
• You can post content to that group only instead of to everyone.
• You can also ‘group chat’ with anyone in that group.

• You can post documents to the group.
• You can make the group open, private, or secret.
• You can create an email address for the group so that members can send and receive updates via email (these will post to the groups page too).
• Members of the group will receive notifications of posts to the group (you can turn this on/off).
• Members must be invited to the group, but can be invited by anyone in the group.
• If you are added to a group you don’t want to belong to, you can leave.

What is Cool about this:

• Group chat! Now instead of doing rapid fire marathon facebook emails with my two or more friends, we can chat!
• More Relevance, less noise. Now instead of posting something that goes out to EVERYONE, you can be much more relevant & provide much greater value to those that you are connected with.
• This goes for events too! Instead of posting an event that goes into everyone’s newsfeed, or emailing to ensure that they see it, you can post it on your groups page.
• Worried about posting photos? Now you can post those pics of your kids just to your family (or those of yourself at a party without your boss seeing them 
• Now instead of wondering if your family, or certain friends saw those pictures (or having to tag them all to be sure, or having to email them all), you can post them to the group and know that each member will be notified.
• Mailing lists, documents ,etc. will be great for people who currently use yahoo groups, project management platforms, or traditional email to share information.
• “Secret Groups” can be used if you don’t want anyone to see who is a member, or any posts.
• “Open Groups” are fully public. All members and posts are public.
• Closed Groups (which is the default setting) allow people to see who belongs to the group, but not the posts.

One of the big questions that I hear people asking already is:

How does this affect Business/fan pages?

I’m not sure that it really does. Keeping in mind that people cannot join any group without an invitation, or by requesting one and ‘being accepted’,  I don’t see this as a setup that businesses would want to use in place of a ‘business page’ (formerly known as Fan Pages). BUT, I will hold off on judgment onthat until I have seen more, and am more certain about some of the functionality.

This could be very useful however for business owners to group clients, customers, employees, etc. When I do seminars, I often have people with concerns that ‘their competition’ will see their brilliant content. My personal feeling has always been “share value”. Focus on providing good for others versus holding back out of fear. That is still my belief, but this does give another option for those who worry about this.

This is all new, so I am certain that I will notice new nuances, details, etc., and new questions will arise. I will update as we go. I’m still testing whether someone can join (or how they would find) open groups, and how updates appear (currently I am getting notifications, but nothing in my ‘newsfeed’).

For now, rejoice that this offers you more options in

• what you post, and
• what you ‘hear’ on facebook,
• great new tools to share with your friends, and others, and
• a whole new level of privacy!