Facebook Announces New “Send” Button

The world’s largest social network with more than 500-million registered users, Facebook Inc., today announced via a blog post a new “Send” button aimed at making it easier for users to share content on Facebook only with a select group of friends.

Facebook says its users have created more than 50-million Groups, and the new Send button could be used to share content with select groups.

There are currently two ways to share a link on Facebook, either through the Share or Like button. The only caveat with the current share methods is a user cannot filter which friends see the shared content, rather a shared link simply appears in the Newsfeed of all friends – the new Facebook Send button simply aims to change that disadvantage.

 For example, the Send button could be used to share an article only with work colleagues, or even more importantly, links containing personal content could be shared only with closer trusted friends.

Facebook says the new Send button will begin to appear beside the Like button on select publisher websites already using the Like button. Facebook should perhaps consider consolidating the two different buttons into a single share button that would include the option of sharing only within groups, that way webmasters wouldn’t have to worry about adding yet another button.

Facebook will roll out the new Send button for more websites and will be readily available to all webmasters in the future through the Facebook social developers plugin page.

Google Inc. is also developing a social sharing button of its own. The search giant announced its “+1” Like-type button that registered Google users could click on within search results, as the company tries to make search more social and to generate more relevant search results.

The Google +1 button is currently in private beta, the company did not elaborate when its +1 button would be broadly available.

Facebook today also announced new features for Groups, including integration with Questions, the ability to upload photo albums, and additional membership controls.