So Facebook has finally done it… it has risen to the challenge of Google+ by introducing Facebook Friends Lists.
These lists give you the ability to organize your friends into various categories, so you have much more control over who sees your news feed by filtering your updates to these different categories.
Smart list: Facebook creates four lists (work, school, family and city) and updates them automatically based on the profile info that your friends have in common with you. One can also manage these lists by manually adding or removing friends from these lists. For example, I have listed SocialMetre as a place of work in my profile and Facebook has created a smart list called “Socialmetre” in my profile and automatically added friends who have Socialmetre listed as their workplace in their profile.
Close Friends list: As the name suggests, this list would consist of your best friends whom you want to keep in touch with on a daily basis and do not want to miss even a single update of theirs.
Acquaintances list: This list is typically for people you know causally or not in active contact with. For example, classmates you no longer are touch with on a regular basis or your business contacts can be added to this list. You won’t see each and every post of theirs but only the important stuff. So who decides what is important? … well! that is done by Facebook.
Apart from the above lists, you also have something called the Restricted list. Friends in this list will only see your Public posts. You’ll still be friends on Facebook so that you can send messages or tag them in a post or if you want to connect to them from time to time. You can be in total control of information flow here.
These lists are being rolled over to everyone in the next couple of days and will be rolling out on mobile over the next few weeks.
So what do you think of these lists? Are you going to be using them?
