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Facebook's New Community Pages Attempt to Harness Shared Knowledge

by Caleb Johnson on April 19, 2010 at 06:45 PM

Never one to shy away from change or the addition of a new feature, Facebook has now introduced Community Pages to the social networking world. Community Pages, which are still in beta, are basically a spin-off from Fan Pages. As you might recall, Fan Pages were created to help people connect and interact with musicians, businesses and other brands. But people soon began creating Fan Pages for more general topics, like cooking or hiking, and Facebook today unveiled a new type of page, which it hopes will become "the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic."

The page's 'Info' tab contains a short description of the subject, and there's a Wikipedia tab that contains the subject's full entry, if available. Facebook users will be able to post, link and view articles and photos related to the subject under the 'Related Posts' section, which appears to function like a glorified and topical wall. For now, Facebook is taking requests from users who want to post content to this section, but, once all the kinks are worked out, anybody with a Facebook account should be able to post content to a Community Page.

Community Pages are certainly promising, but, if they aren't properly policed and moderated, they could quickly become a cesspool of unreliable user-generated content -- rather than a hub for users interested in learning more about a subject. [From: The Facebook Blog and Tech Crunch

Tags: BreakingNews, community pages, CommunityPages, facebook, facebook community pages, FacebookCommunityPages, SocialNetworking, top, Web, wikipedia

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