problems of online sharing is figuring out how to only selectively share. In e-mail, it’s intuitive — type only the names of the people you want to send photos of your vacation to and then hit send. With Facebook, the default choices have always been much less selective — basically a choice between friends or the entire world. There is the option to create a specific list, but it’s cumbersome and few people bother — choosing instead to either not share or overshare.

Which is to say, as Zuckerberg admitted today, the current controls on Facebook aren’t good enough.

“You want to interact in different groups and share different things with different sets of people,” Zuckerberg said. “We have make it pretty easy to share with everyone or just your friends, but for many people, just your friends isn’t private.

Figuring it out who to send a message to using algorithms turns out to not work, Zuckerberg said, so the answer it came up with is typically Facebook — the answer is letting users make choices and then make them public.

The solution called “Groups” is to let users create list of friends, but the lists are now public. Each of those groups has a shared online space with group chat and e-mail lists. The idea is to make friend lists “viral” and to eventually migrate the kinds of conversations that happen via e-mail, e-mail listings and bulletin boards from the greater internet onto Facebook. Each group gets its own e-mail address such as This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , which will go out on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Posts from the group will show up on your wall and in usual Facebook notifications, but the wall will only show the ones from groups you frequently use — an extension of the current algorithm that prioritizes updates from close friends over those from an old high school friend you don’t interact with much.

Groups can either be open to the world, closed to the group or even secret — so that it’s existence can’t be discovered by non-members, which will be particularly useful for high school cliques. Any user of a group can add another member, and all current members are notified of the new member.

Groups are best, according to Facebook, when they stay small, up to 100 people, though they have no built in limit.

While groups solves a problem that users have long complained about, the set-up — with group chat, a shared message board and a built-in e-mail list, also makes it clear that Facebook thinks it can colonize other social outposts on the net — such as Yahoo groups, traditional e-mail lists and bulletin boards.

Groups is clearly an attempt to pull those conversations off the greater Web and into Facebook’s growing communication empire.

Facebook also announced today that it is no longer a one-way valve — where photos, videos and post flow in but there’s no way.

Facebook users will be able to export of their data, including all their videos and photos. Facebook will zip up this info into a downloadable file, which you can then open up as a page in your browser.

Finally, Facebook also introduced an app dashboard that lets users see which apps and third-party sites they have allowed to access their profiles and with what permissions. Using the dashboard, users can revoke permissions and see when an app last accessed your data.

Photo: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Credit: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World
• Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative
• Facebook Launches 'Check-In' Service to Connect People in Real World
• Love Google. Hate Facebook. Here's Why
• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Web

Authors: Ryan Singel

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