Collaborative Intelligence & Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web

Social interaction online is not very sophisticated. The newsfeed model of conversation has taken over the social web, from Facebook to Twitter to FriendFeed to MySpace, but by itself it doesn’t serve us very well.

That’s where the creation of groups of sources comes in. Various services have different ways for users to separate their “friends” into different groups, viewable by topic, category or type of connection. Facebook is making changes today to make it easier to break your Facebook Newsfeed into groups. That’s going to be very important. The best Twitter applications offer group functionality that the site itself doesn’t. MySpace offers no such feature, yet. The Facebook news prompted us to try to articulate the value of group creation online. By better understanding the value that groups can deliver, we can better strategize our creation of groups.