(Since FastCompany’s commenting system is terrible and won’t let me 1) register to comment or 2) use my twitter or facebook to comment, here’s my comment to their article)
I think Facebook would say this is an outlier and these guys should just click the easy to see “unsubscribe” button and get out of the group if they don’t want to be a part of it. It’s an outlier because only your “friends” can add you to a group and most people don’t have a gazillion, random people as friends like Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis do.
But on the flipside of things, has anyone has this feature “work” for them? Do people see these wonderful, natural intuitive groups automagically coming into existence? That’s the idea that they talked about… that this would be photo tagging where group creation just kind of happened in a natural and organic way. I haven’t seen any such groups cross my path just yet.
When the Facebook people talk about things that are “social” as a checkbox feature vs. things that are built as being social from the ground up, I have to say that it sounds like a bunch of BS to me. I don’t think the line is that pronounced.
I think FB in America has a link from the homepage for creating new groups but not so in England as far as I can see. Only directly going to http://www.facebook.com/groups gives a link for creating a new one.