Earlier this week Facebook launched a new application. Facebook Groups gives you access to the groups you manage or are a member of. As well as resurfacing an old community mainstay, the return of Groups as a standalone app can be seen as a defensive move for Facebook, ensuing that start-ups in a similar field gain less traction.
Groups on Facebook used to be a really (really) big thing, but they were somewhat overtaken by Pages. Groups never went away, but they remained a touch more inaccessible than more popular features. In part the Groups app (available on iOS and Android) will help expose the feature to Facebook users and potentially introduce it to millions more.
It will also act as fire-break between Facebook and other group-messaging applications. Through a mix of Facebook’s size, limited space on a smartphone’s screen, and doing everything possible to be thought of as ‘first’ in the consumer’s brain, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is going to bring Groups back to life and diminish the prospect of other start-ups and software clients getting a foothold.
Let’s start with the idea of limited space on a smartphone. By this I don’t mean installation size or use of memory in a smartphone, but on icon and widget space. With space for just twenty-four applications on the first screen of an iPhone and a similar number of shortcuts on the primary Android home screens, any application that can reach these first screens will be opened more frequently than those installed at the far end of the app launcher screens.
The trick for Facebook will be to get its app moved up by the user, and this is where the brand name of Facebook will come in useful. It only took me a few days with the standalone Messaging app to move it so it was next to the Facebook app icon on that first screen. I’m sure that Groups will be just as easily promoted (although unlike Messaging, Facebook Groups will continue to be accessible via the main Facebook smartphone app).
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