Automatic Facebook Groups?

The new Facebook Groups feature launched this month promises a lot of new functionality, but one thing it doesn't do is create new Groups of friends automatically. P2P real-time search company Wowd launched a new feature today that automatically bundles groups of Facebook friends who talk together and discuss the same things. It then allows you to view all their updates together and in context.

The service's accuracy is remarkable. I've got 1000 friends on Facebook and Wowd bundled together 26 of them who are in the non-profit sector and within seconds, for example. Give it a try and see what Groups Wowd creates out of your friends; you'll likely wish those groups could be ported over to the native Facebook interface. Wowd says that will be enabled as soon as the Facebook API allows it. That's good, because no one's Facebook interface is as good as Facebook's.

What's the value of Groups like this? As we wrote in an article called Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web, groups provide context, they allow streams of updates from different people to be given different priorities and they facilitate increased intimacy within small groups that exist within a larger set of contacts of subscriptions.

There's a whole lot of potential in the creation and management of groups. This new Wowd feature demonstrates how some intelligent data processing can provide immediate value through the automatic creation of groups. The desktop notifications for particular groups is really hot.

The core Wowd product is for Firefox, but the new Facebook Groups feature can be used in other blogs, including Chrome.