May 10, 2012 at 5:36 PM ET
Facebook says that all members of Groups — other than those in colleges and universities — will soon be able to use file-sharing on the social network.
"We started to roll out file sharing for all Groups," a Facebook spokesperson told msnbc.com Thursday.
There are 380 million monthly active users of Groups; file sharing is "only out to a small percentage right now, but we'll be rolling it out to all groups soon."
Facebook made file-sharing available to its Groups for Schools in the past month, letting Group members share documents such as lecture notes, assignments and schedules, with each file upload limited to 25 megabytes.
The same size restriction remains for all groups, as do the same legal restrictions. Mashable, which first reported the story, noted that on the no-no list are music files and executable files (the latter could be used to spread malware). "But e-books, comics, music videos and other small movies are fair game."
If inappropriate or copyrighted files are shared, "You can report content the same way you do for other content across the site. You'll see a report link under each file," the Facebook spokesperson said.
The social network doesn't envision that being a big problem. "PowerPoint presentations, Word documents or Excel spreadsheets are probably the most obvious file types people might share with other group members.
"But, people often use our features and products in innovative ways that we don't necessarily predict when we first launch them, so however people choose to use this new file uploading to share with their groups is up to them. We'll wait and see as it rolls out."
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