I came across this great "How to" post from Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, "How to Create Sub-Groups to Maximize Your Online Effectiveness." In it, Marshall argues that the current news feed model of conversation dominant on so many popular social networking sites doesn't serve us as well as it should. In order to have more meaningful and effective online relationships, we need more groups within our groups.

I couldn't agree with this point more. While it's great to be connected to hundreds or thousands (even millions if you're Ashton Kutcher) of people online, we could be limiting the value we derive from these networks by not prioritizing our interactions. Let's face it, you're not interested in all the same things as your friends on Facebook and there are those friends that more often post items of interest to you, and therefore you're interaction with and connectivity to those people should be easier and more immediate than some others.

Marshall points out that the value of these groups is in prioritization (high-priority sources in high-priority places), context (messages strike a more meaningful tone when read in the appropriate context) and intimacy (more contact with the right people). These are all great points. Not to mention, groups can just save you time! And allow you to get more value from your social experience, making you want to use it more often.

He concludes by pointing out that while groups have value, you still need to keep the full community of connections for exposure to knew ideas. There will be times when you want to communicate your own messages to a larger group, or have additional resources when something new comes up. In those cases, we'll want a larger community to interact with.

These are all great lessons for community users. Certain experts have knowledge that we need, and we should have easy access to those experts. Groups are a great way to increase collaboration with those who have that knowledge, and share the same interests and activities. We don't like to admit it, but we all have our favorites.