Organizing friends on Facebook is not an enjoyable task and many of us have not bothered with it. In fact, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, less than 5% users employ the feature which was introduced in 2007. In order to make it easier to manage the Friends Lists and, thereby, make it more popular, the social media giant has come up with an upgrade to its Friends Lists feature.
Doing away with the efforts which a user has to put in to organize friends into groups (check Google+ Circles), Facebook has decided to find a way to automatically curate Friends Lists on behalf of the user.
The social network has announced the following improvements to make the Friends Lists easy and more useful:
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Smart Lists: Smart Lists automatically creates lists and stays up-to-date based on the common profile information listed by you and your friends like family, work, city and school. For example if your are an alumni of Standford University and have mentioned as such in your profile, you will soon see a smart list called Stanford University with all your friends who have the same University listed on their profile. This means that if your have a college reunion, then you can share photos with just your college friends without inconveniencing your other friends.
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Close Friends List : These lists do not automatically update themselves. The Close Friends List is for all of your best friends. If you add friends to this list you will see everything they post in your News Feed. You will also be able to filter your News Feed so that you will only see their photos and updates. If you want to make sure that you do not miss out anything they post, you can even choose to receive notifications when they post updates.
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Acquaintances List is for old classmates or business contacts that you want to see less of in your News Feed. Facebook will still use its algorithms to show you important things they post like an engagement or birth.
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Suggestions: Suggestions continues the process by suggesting friends that you may want to add to one of your lists. Facebook uses its algorithms to determine which friends may belong in a group.
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Facebook has also added a “restricted” list for people who will only get to see your updates that you specify as Public. The purpose behind the Restricted List is to keep people in those lists as Facebook friends so that you can send them messages or tag them in a post, if you want to connect with occasionally.
As earlier, Facebook will also let you add or remove friends manually to make the lists more useful. From there, you can see updates as well as share content just with a specific list of friends.
A thing to be noted is that these changes will not affect the lists which you may have created in the past and if you want to, you can still create custom lists. Though your friends will not be able to see the category of the list you have put them into, they can see each other’s names for perspective. When you add some one as a friend or confirm a friendship request, you can add them directly into any of your existing lists.
Though it seems like these upgrades are an answer to the rising popularity of Google+, Facebook Product Manager Blake Ross denies the same. He said that Facebook has been working on the feature for many months now, and they feel that nobody has got the friend grouping right so far. Ross believes that Smart Lists and its automatic grouping is an attempt to reduce the pains of organizing friends. The improved Friend Lists is expected to roll out on everyone’s Facebook accounts sometime this week.