New Groups, New Opportunities

Today, we launched a new version of Groups. This new version of Groups simplifies the creation of groups, adds group chat, and provides mailing list style notifications to keep group members informed and up to date.

Groups has new engagement potential for social games and other applications on Facebook. Groups are great way for people to coordinate (“left flank, move in!”), collaborate (“can anyone help me finish this blog post?”), or even compete (“i just crushed you. no one can come close to me. i dare you!”).

We gave these Groups a home in the main navigational area of the site. This reinforces for users the importance of the left hand menu for discovering the most important things for them to do on Facebook. Bookmarks and Groups will both appear above the fold and follow the same conventions in that they only appear as long as the user remains engaged.

As part of this launch we are enhancing the Graph API to support this new functionality. If you are already using the Graph API to work with existing Groups, your code does not need to change; it will just keep working.

To get started, check out the Graph API overview and Group API reference. If you have questions, feedback or need help using Groups from your application, just ask on the Graph API forum.

We will be adding more Group features in the near future, including the ability to create Groups and manage Group membership directly from the API. Stay tuned!

Jared, product manager for Games, is creating a group for all the college friends he crushed in Halo.