I remember when I first got a Facebook account. It was extremely limited to certain schools. Well Facebook has made some changes to keep collegiate students connected along with some cool features. Hit the jump for details.
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Remember when Facebook was Thefacebook, a site whose access was restricted to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and other Ivy League schools? With Facebook Groups for Schools, Facebook has gone back to basics.
On Wednesday, Facebook launched Groups for Schools, which creates school-specific groups.
To join, students must demonstrate that they’re affiliated with the school by providing an associated email address, and only enrolled faculty and students are allowed – no alumni. Moreover, if a student graduates, he or she will be removed from the group.
The primary focus of Groups for Facebook appears to be a social network tied to each school, with an emphasis on sharing files and activities that can be used for classwork. “When you join a group within the school community, you can share files, create events, message other members and stay up-to-date on what’s happening around campus, according to a Facebook FAQ.
There’s also one big privacy change, Facebook said: other students at the school or university can be messaged at any time. Normally, Facebook users must be “friends” within the network before messages can be exchanged.
The service isn’t live yet for all schools; to check, Facebook recommends that interested students visit the About page and search for their school. If the service is live, a message will appear on the left side of the home page.
Like other Facebook Groups, an admin must form the group and invite members. A list of suggested groups will appear at the top of the page. But Groups for Schools exists separately from existing Groups, so that a volleyball club at Notre Dame will be forced to form a new, separate group within the Groups for Schools framework.
There are three kinds of school groups: Open, where anyone can see who is in the group and post to it; Closed, where anyone can see who is in the group, but only members can post and exchange files; and Secret, where only members can see that the group actually exists, and who is in it.
The files that can be exchanged include lecture notes, assignments, schedules and “many other file types” that can be shared with other members of a school group, Facebook said. The maximum size of those files are 25 Mbytes, it said.
