Facebook to let users create personal groups

(CNN) -- An easy way to create personal groups within your friends list and the ability to download everything you've posted are coming to Facebook.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the planned changes Wednesday at a media event about several tweaks to the ubiquitous social-networking site.

He said the new features would begin rolling out later Wednesday.
Facebook Groups, Zuckerberg said, is designed to solve "the biggest problem in social networking."
"A lot of people talk about this as a privacy problem, but I think even more than that, it's an annoying [others] problem," Zuckerberg said.

A user might say, "I would post this, but do I really want to bug all my friends who don't like jogging how great it is that I had an awesome jog this morning?" he said.

Groups will let Facebook users make groups like family, work friends, friends from school or friends with a specific interest.

They'll be able to share information specifically with members of those groups and even create group chats with those members.

"We think this is really going to change fundamentally how you use Facebook today," said Justin Shaffer, product manager for Groups and former CEO of Hot Potato, a mobile social-media app that Facebook bought this summer.

A list feature on Facebook already lets users create subsets of their friends. But Zuckerberg said that only about 5 percent of Facebook's roughly 500 million users use it.
"We wanted to design something that would be used by more than 5 percent of people ... that is so easy to use that everyone will interact with it," he said.

Current Facebook lists are a solitary exercise. A user can create those lists, then can decide which ones will see certain posts, like photos or status updates.

But creating groups is a more social exercise, Zuckerberg said. When one user creates a group, all the other members get notified. They can choose to leave, but will more likely engage, and create lists of their own, he said.

With another tool called "Download Your Information," Facebook users will be able to create a zip file of everything they've done on the site.

The announcement came with a bit of advice.
"This is all of your personal information," said product manager David Recordon. "You should take security seriously."

Members will be able to go to their Account Settings, then click "download" to get the info.
At Facebook, Zuckerberg said, it is "a core part of our belief" that people own the information they post on the site.

Facebook also announced a new apps dashboard that will make it easier to see what information applications can access about users.

In the past, Facebook had come under fire from some users for what they considered privacy invasion by third-party apps like games and quizzes. Many apps need access to a user's information to work, but critics feared that access could be abused.

"For individuals, we think this is a pretty big win," dashboard product manager Carl Sjogreen said Wednesday.

Obama's education plan draws fire

By Ed Henry, CNN Senior White House Correspondent

October 5, 2010 3:06 p.m. EDT

Washington (CNN) -- It has gotten very little attention so far, but make no mistake: President Obama is pushing for an absolute paradigm shift in the role that community colleges will play in producing America's highly skilled workers of the future -- and not everyone is happy about it.

Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, the vice president's wife, who teaches at a community college in Northern Virginia, are convening the first ever White House Summit on Community Colleges. It promotes an ambitious goal: getting community colleges to produce an additional 5 million graduates by 2020.

If the number of community college graduates sharply increases over the next 10 years, it could help the U.S. have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world -- an honor that America once held, but lost long ago.

Now Obama is determined to restore America's lost position atop that heap by framing the community college as one of the great economic issues of the 21st century, while the private sector looks to find as many highly skilled workers as possible, whether they have two-year or four-year college degrees.

"The idea here is simple," Obama said Monday at a White House event promoting his "Skills For America's Future" program to develop better partnerships between private industry and community colleges. "We want to make it easier to connect students looking for jobs with businesses looking to hire. We want to help community colleges and employers create programs that match curricula in the classroom with the needs of the boardrooms."

 

The attraction of this plan to middle-class families still struggling to dig out of the recession is twofold. Since folks are having a hard time saving money for their children's higher education, the notion of paying two years' worth of college bills instead of four is becoming an increasingly attractive option. And with jobs of any kind so scarce, Obama is highlighting the fact that having at least a two-year degree is better than no degree at all.

At a backyard event in Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month, Obama called community colleges a "great pathway for young people" entering an uncertain job market.

"They may not go to four-year colleges right away, but the community college system can be just a terrific gateway for folks to get skills," said Obama. "Some start at a community college and then go on to four-year colleges. Some just get technical training, get a job and then come back maybe five years later to upgrade their skills or adapt them to a new business."

But not everyone is on board with the effort. Organizations like Kaplan, the University of Phoenix, and various for-profit colleges are lashing out at Obama's plan, charging that community colleges are being showered with too much presidential attention and federal aid at the expense of other institutions.
"They propose sweeping and arbitrary regulations against career colleges while turning a blind eye to the deep and intractable problems among community colleges," according to a written statement by The Coalition for Educational Success, which represents proprietary colleges and claims to serve more than 200,000 students at over 300 campuses in 33 states. "A look at the facts would suggest that the administration is attacking the wrong target and their proposed regulations would hurt the economy, jobs -- and most of all students."

The coalition said that by excluding career colleges, Obama is "unnecessarily shortchanging millions of students and a wide swath of the nation's future workforce."

It also charges that community colleges don't pump out as many graduates as the president is leading the public to believe, citing statistics showing that career colleges graduate 58 percent of their students, while community colleges graduate only 20 percent of their students.

Obama sharply disagrees, and in a time of austerity, he is trying to pump large sums of federal money to back up his talk. The health care legislation signed into law earlier this year included $2 billion to fund the Community College and Career Training initiative to try to improve graduation rates.

The 2009 stimulus bill also had $3.5 billion in Pell grants aimed at helping low-income students at hundreds of community colleges, according to White House officials, as well as $1 billion in workforce training programs at community colleges.