Despite technical glitches that caused outages on the site for some of its 500 million users earlier this week, Facebook is making amends with the unveiling of three new features. The tools aim to give people more control over the information they share on the wildly popular online social network.

Among these new features is “Groups,” which lets Facebook members target their updates and swap information with cabals of their choosing. Facebook’s blog explained how the new feature works:

“With new Groups, we made it easy for you to build a space for important groups of people in your life -- your family, your soccer team, your book club. All you have to do to get started is to create a group, add friends and start sharing.

When a group member posts to the group, everyone in the group will receive a notification about that post. Now I won't have to guess anymore about whether my parents saw the pictures I posted of their grandkids; when I post in my family group, I'll know that they've been notified about it and that only they will see it. Since information posted in my new groups is only visible to group members by default, I can feel confident about who sees what I post.”

That should come as a relief to Facebook enthusiasts who wish to share particular news or photos with cherry-picked friends, family and colleagues.

"Sometimes you don't want to post something to all of your friends, not because you don't want them to know, but because you don't want to annoy them," said Zuckerberg at a press gathering at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. "The naive solution is to do something like friend lists. Almost no one wants to make lists."

Also fostering better communication with small groups of people is Facebook’s newly launched, “Group Chat” – a tool that lets users chat with one person at a time on Facebook, or everyone in your group at once.