The Way I See It…
I love what Facebook can do for a business. Yes, I think every small business needs a presence on the social giant. This doesn’t change the fact, however, that Facebook itself is not that original.
Yesterday, Facebook announced the overhaul of Facebook Groups, providing a new way for friends to communicate with each other. In short, now users can create “groups” of friends and family, and chat, in real time, with several at once.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberk told Mashable that the new features solve the biggest problem we’ve, until now, faced with social media:
Before today’s changes, interactions on Facebook were primarily one-on-one (messages) or interactions with all of your Facebook friends (status updates). From what I gathered, Groups is designed to solve that issue, something that Zuckerberg calls “the biggest problem in social networking.”
Now, if you look at social media as all things “social” on the Internet, you’ll realize that Facebook isn’t the inventor of anything new. Services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy used these types of features more than a decade ago. And many similar services offering up means to selectively communicate with approved friends and family have come and gone.
So, while I applaud Facebook for expanding it’s offering and recognizing features a good number of its users will appreciate, I’d like to see the goliath avoid comments that allude they invented the wheel.
