Facebook has rolled out a new version of groups announced on the Facebook blog.

“Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.
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Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.”

There are three kinds of groups: open, closed and secret. Open groups have public membership listings and public content. Private ones have public membership but public but private content. For secret groups, both the membership and content are private.

A key part of the idea is that the group members collectively define who is in the group, spreading the work of setting up and maintaining the group over many people.

But a serious issue with the new Facebook group framework is that a member can unilaterally add any of their friends to a group. No confirmation is required by the person being added. This was raised as an issue by Jason Calacanis.

The constraint that one can only add Facebook friend to a group he belongs to does offer some protection against ending up in unwanted groups (e.g., by spammers). But it could still lead to problems. I could, for example, create a closed group named Crazy people who smell bad and add all of my friends without their consent. Since the group is not secret like this one, anyone can see who is in the group. Worse yet, I could then leave the group. (By the way, let me know if you want to join any of these groups).

While this might just be an annoying prank, it could spin out of control — what might happen if one of your so called friends adds you to the new, closed “Al-Queda lovers” group?

The good news is that this should be easy to fix. After all, Facebook does require confirmation for the friend relation and has a mechanism for recommending that friends like pages or try apps. Either mechanism would work for inviting others to join groups.

We have started working with a new group-centric secure information sharing model being developed by Ravi Sandhu and others as a foundation for better access and privacy contols in social media systems. It seems like a great match.

See update.