Facebook rolls out Groups For Schools
updated 05:55 pm EDT, Wed April 11, 2012
Participation tied to school's .edu email domain
Facebook has rolled out a new group service targeting constituents within an individual college or university. Groups For Schools lets students or faculty from a single institution of higher learning with a common .edu email address have their own exclusive group inaccessible by others outside their educational community. Students will be able to share files within the group and create protected subgroups.
Facebook began testing the school groups at Brown and Vanderbilt last December. It now plans to aggressively make Groups for Schools accessible to campuses across the country.
One core feature of the Group is the ability to share files. Group members can upload and share lecture notes, assignments, schedules, and files of up to 25MB. Facebook will monitor all files for copyrighted content and prevent any illegal material from being circulated. Also, .exe files, which could contain malware, aren't allowed.
Because access to the Groups for Students is controlled, participants won't have to worry about parents, younger siblings, high school friends, or even recruiters, seeing anything that they might have posted. The move is effectively a return to Facebook's roots, as it started up in 2004 as a social network only for college students. [via TechCrunch]
