Groups and events are a common feature of social networking websites that allow users to unite based on common status, location, interests, and plans. What do social networking groups add to the social networking experience? How do social networks enable real-life event planning? What unique subcommunities manifest themselves in online group interfaces? How have social networking groups been used as social activism?

On a social networking site, a group is a collection of members united by common interest. Social networking group interfaces usually offer varying levels of group membership and member privacy. Groups can be open to all members of a social network, or open to invitations only. Group administrators—usually the group creator—can control all invitations or allow members to invite their friends. Groups get their own profile pages with pictures, lists of members, and a discussion board, and these group profiles may be public or private, viewable by the entire network or only by its members. Finally, a user can choose to show or hide their lists of groups, depending on how they use their profile.

Groups are usually integrated with other social network structures. On Facebook, for example, groups can be restricted to members of a college or regional network. Groups can function as mailing lists as well; administrators of a Facebook group can message every member of a group or invite them to events at the click of a button.

What kind of groups are out there on social networking sites? There are very practical groups serving as an online representation of real-life groups, such as high school and college class years, student and volunteer groups, and small employers without a social network of their own. And there are also groups that reflect social networking fads: fan clubs for teachers or classmates that merely have an online, not physical presence; outlandish statements like common uses of toilet paper; and repositories of cute or funny pictures of animals. The most whimsical of groups even compete for the largest number of members, including a particularly infamous Facebook group that collected over 100,000 members in late 2006.

In addition to user-created groups, some sites offer sponsored groups, or groups administered by a popular company. A blog describes this phenomenon: these companies, to promote brand loyalty in teenagers and students, team up with sites like Facebook to get a special Sponsored group that offers promotions or deals, like free iTunes downloads every week for the Apple Students group, or a Pepsi can redesign contest.

MySpace (as shown to the right) and Facebook offer fully-functional group interfaces, with member lists, photos, a forum, and flexibility on how groups invite members and how public their profiles are. Other sites offer unique structures for how users can group themselves. LiveJournal’s form of groups is called LiveJournal Communities, a feature which lets many users contribute entries to a common journal. Xanga’s form of groups is called Xanga Blogrings, in which members are part of a ring or sequence of links; and any visitor to a blog in a blogring can quickly view the previous, next, or a random member of the blogring. Because Xanga is a blog site, blogs are often focused on academic or personal topics, so blogrings can function as useful links for more information or perspectives on similar topics or lifestyles.

Another feature similar to groups which has become common on large social networking sites in an interface for planning and publicizing events. An event interface allows users to create events, list important information, and invite their friends on the social network. Invited users can let the event creators know whether or not they plan on attending the event through a button click, so the event creators do not have to personally handle potentially hundreds of invitations. MySpace and Facebook both offer Event interfaces with all of these features.

Events are of similar structure to groups. Like groups, they may publicly or privately display the list of users who are attending or missing out on the event. As with in Facebook groups, Facebook events enable the event creator to message all event guests. And as real-life groups such as community groups or college dorms put on real-life events, social networking groups can act as the creator of social networking events, one feature of Facebook events.

Social networking websites with events also may integrate them into other site pages. For example, Facebook offers “upcoming event” reminders on the user’s homepage, and a calendar of public events of a network on a network’s main page. The site intelligently utilizes the date and time data for events to synchronize it with users’ site usage, and it even links users to a map if the event creator provides an address.

Groups and events essentially are user generated social sub-networks. Users can create their own communities with appropriate privacy constraints and collaborative, information-sharing tools within these features. Through group mailing, groups are a tool for messaging people with specialized interests and opinions, so these online communities can complement or supplement physical communities. Because of the potentially insular nature of sub-communities, group features can suffer from informational and cultural issues.

Groups with common interest, for example, may form content bubbles. In a content bubble, users get so wrapped up in a certain topic, they may disregard or forget social norms or even site policies. One example of a content bubble would be sexually frank communities on LiveJournal. In late May 2007, several hundred journals were kicked off the site for sexual content that could potentially be linked to child pornography or sexual abuse. Many of the journals were comprised of fiction depicting such situations, but with no real-life link to them. While this kind of content is against LiveJournal’s policy, the users gradually developed a content bubble in which sexually explicit content seemed perfectly normal in the context of a journal. Erotic fanfiction writers on the site encouraged each other to push their comfort levels regarding the subject of their work, and eventually it was unsurprising that outsiders of this sub-community found this content inappropriate. For more on information bubbles, see the section on issues within our blogs and forums page.

Another kind of controversial sub-community that exists on social networking site groups is groups focusing on race. Some Facebook groups that were invented for fun to humorously celebrate a culture—one example being “Americans for the increased importation of Asian Women”—are interpretable as unacceptable racial insults to others. Social networking sites make existing racial issues more visible, such as the existence of groups such as Ryerson University’s “I’m a White Minority @ a Toronto University”. Ryerson University looked at other similar scenarios in order to decide how to react—do nothing, enact punishment, or undergo a campus-wide re-education on race relations? Social networking sites as well need to be able to analyze the group content to sharpen the often-blurred line between pride and racism that groups like these reflect.

Because they allow huge populations of young and ambitious high-school and college students to communicate and network, social networking sites are effective grounds for political and social activism to spread. Service projects like groups spreading awareness about the Darfur genocide have emerged, and groups are quick to respond to news and tragedies. For example, immediately after the Virginia Tech shootings of April 2007, a Facebook group called “I’m okay at Virginia Tech” was created so students could confirm their safety to their friends on Facebook.

While the groups and events of mainstream social networking sites provide a useful means of activism, other social networking sites choose to devote their content entirely to political discussion and activism. Unique sites like Change.org build content around their users’ political and social views, and give an easy interface for supporting political candidates and offices. Many net users champion that the web is allowing for a much-needed, potentially nationwide interface for discussing pressing issues, but some net experts are concerned about the power that the web’s biggest social networks have over their content. A media site article reminds users that social networking sites are the property of the site owners, not a public forum protected by first-amendment rights. The choice to remove a controversial video from the web could change the course of history.

Finally, groups on social networking sites, because of the common interest aspect of them, have been used for the purposes of petitions and protests. Users equate membership of a group with a signature on a petition; the Stanford Daily even quotes the size of Facebook groups such as a group of students in support of a university employee fair wage policy to measure student support. When sites make sweeping changes to their layouts or policies, popular groups have emerged in protest of these policies. For example, when Facebook came out with the News Feed and Mini Feed features, its users were so shocked by the influx of information that over 100,000 users joined a group protesting it, and Facebook even responded to these users in its blog.