**UPDATE**

Pages and Groups are remaining distinct entities, serving slightly different purposes, but with very similar looks now.  According to today’s post on the Facebook blog, the new Group layout is in effect, and there was a very calculated reason for changing things.  The most important change is that anything posted to a Group from a user’s friend will now show up in that user’s newsfeed.  Until now, you  would have to visit the Group to see all recent activity.  As for the actual layout, Facebook wanted to make Groups look like Pages and home pages, for simplicity.

*NEWS FROM LAST WEEK:

According to AllFacebook.com, it appears that Facebook is possibly merging Pages and Groups. Some groups saw the changes on Tuesday, October 13th, but their Group layouts reverted back to the old design within 24 hours. Currently, there many similarities between the two, but there are also some significant differences.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the features in the NEW setups:

When the changes to Groups were temporarily launched, Groups looked almost exactly like Pages.

Here’s an example of an “old” Group:

And here’s an example of what the “new” Groups will allegedly look like:

And here’s a Page, for comparison:

You’ll notice that the “new” Groups have changed to look almost exactly like pages.

Is Facebook merging the two?  Do you think they should?