How To Edit About This Group On Facebook

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If you have hundreds or even thousands of Facebook friends, it's easy to cross over into too-much-information territory. After all, who wants their parents or boss to see everything they put up for their friends? That's why Facebook has long allowed users to create Friend Lists, which let people manage their privacy settings for different groups of friends.

But there is a problem with Facebook's Friend Lists feature: Nobody uses it. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, just 5 percent of Facebook users had made a list as of October 2010. Now, this isn't a company that lets its technology stagnate—witness Facebook's recent push into e-mail with the Messages service, introduced as an apparent competitor with Gmail. After the failure of Lists, Facebook decided to start over and created Facebook Groups, a new friend-dividing feature that uses an opt-out strategy as a way of reaching widespread adoption.

With the new Facebook Groups, you can create a list of pals (such as "Work," "Family" or "Roller Derby") and add whichever friends you want. Members can then send mass e-mails to the entire group ("Party at my house!") or post to a shared wall space.

Facebook executives probably feel that allowing users to force their friends into Groups is the only way to get a critical mass to use the feature (remember that 5 percent figure for Friend Lists). The company used a similar strategy to turn its Photos feature into one of the largest repositories of drunken party pictures the world has ever known—although a minority of users actually upload photos to Facebook, anybody can "tag" his or her friends in these pictures, and a whopping 95 percent of users have been tagged.

But while Facebook Groups may prove indispensable to a lot of users, this strategy also raises a number of worries. Users can easily find themselves a member of a handful of groups they never wanted to belong to, which creates the opportunity for mischief. For example, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington recently added Zuckerberg (with whom he is Facebook friends) to a fictitious pedophilia-related group as a way of proving the point.

Such matters aside, Facebook Groups presents a much more immediate problem for most users. By default, all members of a Facebook group get e-mail notifications when just about anything group-related happens—including incidental messages and wall posts. And such updates can start to seem like spam.

Fortunately, cutting down on unwanted notifications is simple. First, click on Account on the top right of the Facebook home page, then select Account Settings in the drop-down menu. From there, click the Notifications tab and scroll down to Groups. This will bring up a page that allows you to curate what sort of Group-related activity results in e-mail alerts. Another level of notifications can be filtered out by opening up the page for an individual group, then clicking the Edit Settings button on the top right.

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