Facebook has yet again changed how things work, and this time it's their desire to deemphasize Facebook Groups in favor of more general Facebook Pages (used to be called "Fan Pages" but that nomenclature seems to have faded into the sunset as of late). You can still create, join, manage and delete Facebook Groups -- though it's not always easy -- but they seem to have decided that making it really tricky will gradually result in more Pages and less Groups on the site.

Okay, so that's their philosophy. If you want to create a group, though, how do you do it?

The trick is to really get comfortable with their new interface, because once you do figure out the path they want you to travel, creating the group is surprisingly straightforward. As in "navigating the labyrinth is easy when you have a GPS" straightforward. :-)

Log in. Go to your Home page. Now look on the left side, you'll see something like this:

It's not the specific groups we're interested in, but the word "GROUPS" above them. Click on it. Yup, it's clickable. You'll move to...

You have a nice view of all the Groups you're involved with, including how recently they've seen activity from a group member, but much more importantly, notice the button on the top right. "+ Create Group".

There it is!

Click on it...

At this point you can name your group, invite members (and be careful, it says "invite" but in fact Facebook Groups now just auto-adds them!) and decide if you want the group to be open, closed, or, my favorite just because I like conspiracies, secret.

In this case, I'll create the meta group "People Who Are Willing to be in This Facebook Group" as an open group:

Everything looks as I desire, with my guinea pig friends listed as initial members, so I click on "Create" and...

Group created and ready to use!