Facebook unbundles further with Facebook Groups

In keeping with the company’s recent strategy of spinning off core services into single-purpose native apps, Facebook this week announced a new app for Groups on iOS and Android. The product, aptly named Facebook Groups, is targeted at small communities of close-knit friends, family members, clubs, or sports teams that like to communicate and share privately on Facebook. Groups not only continues the social network’s march to diversify its app offerings and “unbundle” its monolithic Facebook native app, but also supports its initiatives to further encompass every aspect of users’ social lives with new experiences and independently viable, siloed-off products.

Groups have existed for years on Facebook, both within the web interface and as a subset of its mobile applications. The feature allows teams and smaller communities to communicate on a private news feed of their own, upload and share files and documents, and chat internally via Facebook Messenger. Because of the company’s insistence over the years that its internal product teams—for Photos, Timeline, and so on—collaborate entirely within Facebook Groups, pundits speculated that the company intended for Facebook Groups to become its long-rumored workplace solution, presumably called “Facebook at Work.” According to Facebook, the same services and interfaces that more than a billion people use for their social life could very well be used for business, as well.

For this iteration at least, the workplace offering didn’t surface. The Facebook Groups app offers basic interaction with the standard groups within Facebook, allowing for independent private conversations to carry on within private timelines and news feeds. The app also allows users to define custom bookmarks for different groups that appear on the home screen, a feature which existed in the Messenger app for Android but has yet been unable to be implemented on iOS. (For those curious, the bookmarking effect is achieved with a custom webpage bookmark from mobile Safari.) Apart from Groups features already built into the default Facebook app, Facebook Groups does a better job making visible and publicizing groups that are popular among friends or in a user’s area, like local clubs and sports organizations.

Interestingly, Facebook Groups exists separate from Rooms, a recent initiative from Facebook’s Creative Labs team—an internal experimental group previously responsible for the Slingshot messaging product. Whereas Rooms more aptly targets a public web utility like Reddit, which allows users to define and join custom rooms about any topic through a sharable image screenshot, Groups mostly mirrors existing Facebook features in a new native app chrome.

The release of Facebook Groups should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the company’s recent native offerings, which increasingly seek to spin off experiences once reserved for the standard Facebook app into beautiful and simple single-purpose apps. The company began with Messenger, which featured a novel design approach that has wooed 500 million chatters, and continued with business-focused apps like Pages Manager and Mentions. The overlap between Rooms and Groups (as well as the overlap between Slingshot, Messenger, and Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram Bolt, for that matter) is designed to give users better control of their experiences, and a degree of choice in which product they use to communicate. No matter if communities of smartphone users choose Facebook Groups, Rooms, Messenger, or WhatsApp to keep in touch, Facebook wins.

Users can now escape an overwhelming News Feed experience and enjoy private, intimate conversations with their closest friends and family. For many, that feature alone could justify downloading the Facebook Groups app and replacing their need for the traditional experience entirely. As the company looks to transition from a solitary product to a connective platform of tightly or loosely associated products and services, Facebook Groups represents one small step in the path toward complete unbundling and maximum audience reach.