Internet Groups – Facebook vs. Yahoo/Google

Introduction

Facebook has changed one of the important features in their groups section and I am sure most owners and other serious users have noticed this as it adversely affects them. In spite of several attempts, Facebook is totally unresponsive about this and you could say that I am venting out my frustration here.

In this article, I want to briefly touch upon evolution of ‘group communications’, how internet has influenced/changed its dynamics and then specifically want to focus on feature comparison between groups in social networking sites and email groups. The intent is to make readers realize that Facebook groups are not great anymore and rethink about continuing in the same.

Evolution and Impact

The evolution can be briefly depicted as below. Please note that subsequent stages did not eliminate previous stages completely, they sometimes decreased their predecessors’ importance and sometimes strengthened them too.

Once upon a time, we didn’t have internet and our group interactions were limited to physical clubs and social gathering events; it was common to setup physical meetings to meet specific objectives. Even today these interactions have more personal touch and prove effective in many scenarios. However they have several drawbacks too. For ex: difficult to capture and convey the exact discussion proceedings to an absentee, difficult to conduct offline discussions at leisure etc.

Then the internet entered our lives, and world of emails and chat rooms opened up. Chat rooms offered real time group discussions and email groups offered offline discussions. Practically, chat rooms never became big hit when it comes to serious discussions among people known to each other; instead they became places where people came and left randomly and anonymously, and thus making the discussions more informal. However email groups helped many physical groups to extend their existence to internet world and make their group more effective and faster. Email groups were not just used by people who already had physical groups – some people opened up totally new virtual groups where people started bonding together in unique way. Among email groups, the most successful one was yahoo groups; google groups also attracted several users once it started. But chat rooms slowly faded away due to their unreal nature. Some discussions happen through comments in news websites and blogs too, but this is quite low profile compared to other means.

Then came the wave of social networking sites. Interestingly, several yahoo/google groups took a hit and became almost inactive after this new development. Social networking sites managed to mesmerize most people with tons of several new features such as comment trails, like buttons etc. – these made people express more and faster. When I think about this deeply, I think one of the reasons why groups in social networking sites became hit is that people still missed the charm of chat rooms, its real time feeling. Though social networking sites didn’t provide exactly the same real time experience, it was better and easier when compared to email groups. If we see carefully, relatively more casual email groups are the ones that faded away and got converted to groups in social networking sites; but more focused and serious email groups still exist and are continuing strongly.

But is this really a welcome change? Did people lose something by letting go some of their email groups even if they were for relatively casual purposes? Lets compare features of email groups and social networking sites and see. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to take yahoo groups as the main email group and Facebook as the main social networking site.

Notifications and Message Delivery

In email groups, we have decent flexibility with respect to emails. For ex: in yahoo depending on individual preferences, we can either get

-          Individual emails

-          Daily Digest

-          No Emails

Google groups also has something similar.

Note: Out of these, Daily Digest is bit annoying because it ruins the subject line – no innovative solution has come for this so far – probably due to this most people subscribe for individual emails and then delete whatever they don’t want.

One big advantage of getting such individual emails is that we don’t have fear of missing something even if we were not accessing internet for few days. We could always catch up later, at our leisure. Ability to look at the group communications through email clients and ability to use it when internet connection is not available is also a significant factor.

Facebook offers interesting ‘notification’ options. In case of groups, we earlier had following options:

-          All Activity

-          All Posts

-          Posts from friends

-          Off

Email notification was optional for any of the above setting (except of course the last one J).

Note: I really don’t know who would subscribe for 3^rd option – it seems to defeat the purpose of most groups that involves both friends and strangers.

Another impressive feature in Facebook is that whenever one person is specifically mentioned in the comments, that person gets special notification – that makes things quite relaxing.

Latest bad development in Facebook: Few days back however, Facebook removed the ‘All Activity’ subscription option from groups; no one seems to know why. Personally, I felt a huge impact due to this and in fact this is the main reason why I am writing this article.

In case of semi-serious semi-casual groups, different people look at the groups in different ways. There are always some people who seriously go through most of the interactions that happen within the groups and participate actively. And there are some who prefer looking at the updates only occasionally. For those who belong to first category, this new development is a serious blow. Even a moderator or a owner cannot subscribe to all the activity, can you believe it?

One can manually subscribe for a particular thread by clicking on ‘Follow’ button, but there is no longer a way to automatically subscribe for all threads.

Some think Facebook probably did this to reduce burden on their email servers, and some think Facebook wants people to be on their websites more to make more money through advertisements. Whatever is the reason, it is a major turn off. And Facebook didn’t even bother to notify users about this change, not even group owners.

I think Facebook had already piloted this sometime back with some of the groups – I was trying to get an answer to that, but those groups were not critical for me and I stopped that struggle. Now the change has come as a big blow.

Verdict: Facebook has become very inconvenient due to latest development.

Note: Facebook never provided All Activity subscription for ‘Pages’ and I didn’t like that too. However impact of not having such feature in groups is much greater.

Message Moderation

In email groups the owner/moderator can either keep a setting where messages will be posted to the group only after review/approval or let them flow freely.

However, in Facebook there is no concept of such moderation, though owner of the group can still remove posts from members if it is necessary.

In other words, Facebook has forced openness and this is one of the main reasons why communication has increased in Facebook. The taste of freedom is appreciated by many. However, closed minded groups with message moderations can never switch to Facebook under this condition.

Verdict: Facebook is better choice unless there is too much sensitivity that makes message moderation absolute necessity.

Member Management

Here there is no much difference. Both in email groups as well as in Facebook, various kinds of groups can be formed where aspiring members can freely join or should be approved by group owners.

In Facebook however it is easier for moderator to decide on approval/rejection because generally more information about the person is available in the profile.

Verdict: Facebook has an advantage over email groups.

Networking among members

In email groups, people can always note down individual members’ email addresses and interact with them privately. But in Facebook this is very convenient through add friend feature and individual message feature.

Verdict: Facebook has an advantage over email groups.

Search Archive

Searching yahoo groups website is quite okay; however most people anyway depend on their email box search. Google is however superior when it comes to search and its advantages can be seen in google groups also. Some people are continuing with yahoo groups but switched their email addresses to gmail so that they get benefit of google search through their mailboxes (Huge storage is another big attraction in gmail).

But when it comes to Facebook, the search is pathetic and also clicking on ‘Older Posts’ link at the bottom of the page has always been extremely annoying. However, some people didn’t worry about this so far because they used to subscribe for individual emails and depended on their emailbox search for any specific old communication. Those who didn’t subscribe for emails either struggled or simply sacrificed the search archive feature.

Verdict: Facebook is pathetic when it comes to searching previous communications.

Conclusion

Social networking sites really have capacity to include all the features of email groups plus many more useful/cool features. But unfortunately they are constantly experimenting and testing people’s patience. Above mentioned change in Facebook can be viewed as a classic example.

If the Facebook does not turn back on the feature ‘All Activity’ subscription, I guess many people would want to stop using Facebook groups – especially people like me who seriously follow discussions in some special groups and participate in selected threads. However, it is not easy to come out of the Facebook, mainly because change is not easy when it comes to a big group of people. I sincerely hope that people find a good alternative and Facebook bites dust in this case.