Facebook Groups have long been a part of the Facebook experience as a way for people to organize and discuss particular issues of interest. However, until now, Group activities have been isolated to the group page and it was often difficult to find out what currently was going on within a group. We have received feedback from many of you saying that you want to know more about what is going on within your Facebook Groups, in the same way you know what is happening with your friends and other connections on the site — on your home page.

Starting today, we’re transforming Groups to make it easier for you to communicate with other members and create a smoother experience as you browse through Facebook. If you don’t see the new design just yet, you will soon. We’re currently testing it with a small percentage of people on the site and will roll it out to everyone in the coming days.

First, we revamped the design for Groups so that they look similar to other parts of the site such as profiles and Pages. This means that groups will now have a Wall that summarizes all the recent activities of people within the group and a Publisher that enables members to share their content.

Second, group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your News Feed. To ensure that you get the most interesting and relevant content from groups you’ve joined, you only will see stories when one of your friends posts within a group rather than when all members post. For example, you now will see a story when your friend uploads photos from a recent party at your high school alumni group or when one of your friends posts a message on the Wall of your pick-up soccer group saying that there is a special game this week.

Interacting with Groups will become easier since you can follow the links to the content directly from the News Feed stories or make comments on these stories directly from your home page. You can choose to see only group-related stories on your home page by sorting by Groups from the filters on the left-hand side.

Keep in mind that while Groups and Pages now look the same, they still serve different purposes. Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration, while Pages remain the best way to broadcast messages to your fans if you are a business, organization, public figure or other entity.

You can form a Facebook Group around any community you’re connected to in your real life: book clubs, sports teams, churches, whatever you want. To date, there are over 45 million groups on the site. If you aren’t a member of a group yet, search for one to join or start your own.