A person’s social sphere is made up of many smaller clusters, not necessarily interconnected with each other, and something a person might want to share with one cluster isn’t always what he wants to share with another – This is what Facebook tried to accommodate by implementing Facebook Groups. By creating a group, users could separate their high school buddies from their college buddies, their work buddies from their family, and so on and so forth. It was a great feature, to be certain, but it was apparent that Facebook was not done with it yet, as evident in their most recent addition: the Send Button.

Share, Like, and Send?

So what exactly is the difference of the Send button to the Like and Share Button? Simple, the Send Button allows users to choose who exactly they want to share a site or a picture with. For example, if you found a rather riveting post about the effects of moon dust on stainless steel forks and you think that this might just be a great article to share with your astrophysicist buddies but not one that your high school buddies or your family would appreciate, then the Send Button is the right button for you. It lets you specify the group, email addresses, or the names of the people whom you want to share the article or picture with, it even lets you add a message to go along. It’s an excellent feature that saves quite a bit of time and effort for Facebook users. It’s easy to use, efficient, and a lot of websites have already decided to plug this nifty new feature in. Sites such as The Wall Street Journal and People.com have already added the Send Button to their articles and it’s expected that even more sites will join in once the feature goes into the mainstream. What makes this great is that it makes posts more private and more specific. If you have something you don’t want your boss to see, then Send makes it possible. Of course, I still wouldn’t advice going all out. It’s better to be safe than sorry, after all, and you still wouldn’t want to post something incriminating on your Facebook page, Send button or no.

Groups get an Upgrade

The Send button is not exclusive to Facebook Groups and can, in fact, be used outside it. But it’s part of a bunch of new features that have been rolled out in relation to Facebook Groups. The other new features include album uploading for sharing on groups and also the ability to create nifty polls so as to make it easier to ask members about their preferences or opinions.