ReadWriteWeb

Last week while I was working, I saw the sun set over Portland with one of my closest friends, right at the moment he posted a picture of it to Facebook. At four AM this morning, I had a groggy conversation on Facebook with a friend who couldn't sleep and was watching the first boats come into her corner of Puget Sound.

I've got around a thousand contacts on Facebook but there are about 30 people for whom I'm almost always the first person, no matter what hour of day or night it is, to see their new status messages and shared links. I'm able to post comments on messages from those friends, family members and key professional contacts consistently and in a high-profile way thanks to a new iPhone app that delivers push notifications when selected Facebook contacts post anything. It's called FavFriends and I like it a lot.

Facebook users are now able to opt out of receiving Group chat messages. The news of the new feature came in the form of a response to a Quora question that asked just that: "Why isn't there an option to turn off notifications for a Facebook group?" Groups team members Andrew Bosworth and Feross Aboukhadijeh responded, saying that based on user feedback, that option now exists, accessible via the "Edit Settings" button on the group's page.

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.

People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more - and in different ways.

Facebook's addition of a far more sophisticated Groups feature than was previously available will increase the time users spend on the site, the number of different ways they use Facebook and the importance of the already very important social network in the lives of those who use it. There are three thematic reasons why this is true: the new feature offers an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased context for communication and a big improvement in user privacy, thanks to respect for the contextual integrity of conversations. The new feature runs some risk of being too complicated, though.

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

Zotero, the popular open-source research, bookmarking, and bibliography tool, just released version 2.0 of its Firefox plugin, which, among other things, adds support for sharing libraries with groups. With this new version, users can now easily collaborate in groups and create group libraries. While these new functions are obviously available in Zotero's Firefox plugin, the most interesting changes have happened on Zotero's website, where groups can now create private and public sites to share their collections.

There's a new landing page on Facebook that's designed to get families involved in sharing updates, photos, and videos on the social network. The extended family group invite page, available here, lets you create a private group for your family by inviting current Facebook members and entering in the email addresses of those who have yet to join.

Is Facebook after Grandma and Grandpa now that they have mom and dad? You bet.

Two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha, a former Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server strategist, and Alex DeNeui, also a SQL strategist, are attempting to do what (so far) Microsoft has not: compete head-on with Google Docs by transforming Microsoft Office into online collaboration suite. To do so, they've launched a company called DocVerse, an early-stage startup that aims to simply document sharing and collaboration.

While a great deal of the world was sitting, enthralled with the US political machinations, it appears that Twitter - the microblogging service with which many of us have a dysfunctional love-hate relationship - took the opportunity to roll out a new piece of functionality through its Japanese partners - called Twicco - and simultaneously remove a critical piece of functionality from Twitter for the rest of us.

The good news? Twitter now has that groups feature you've always wanted - if you happen to be located in Japan. The bad news? Hope you liked that last tweet, because there's no getting rid of it now.