Realigning the social graph.  At Facebook’s event today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new Groups feature for better organizing the content you share within the social network.  It’s an extension of what Facebook already had in the way of Lists, but they’re better oriented for specific sharing amongst your growing network of friends, family members and acquaintances. Hot Potato founder Justin Schaffer will be heading up the project.

The new Groups allows for group chats, the ability to connect over email, and generally maintain more control over the communications that takes place within that group.  Instead of controlling the content you share with certain people in a group, the new Groups function allows everyone in this group to not only be aware of their group membership, but communicate with each other as a cohesive group.

“We set out to build a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways.”

Turns out, the group chat was one of the most highly requested features, so it’s important that Facebook find more ways to factor in real-time chat services with its social networking tool. It’s already headed in that direction with a new partnership with Skype.

Beyond this, Facebook is taking on a number of relationship-specific features, providing more and more ways to indicate how you want to communicate with other individuals, regardless of their relationship to you. Keeping the communication factor as a central focal point within feature upgrades is necessary for Facebook’s long-term success, as adding in portal tools for the sake of adding in portal tools will take Facebook in the same direction as Yahoo, circa the late 1990s. In this case, such new feature upgrades for Facebook will hopefully reduce the confusion around privacy settings, as they will become more inherent to Facebook’s site tools.