Facebook officially unveils revamped Friend List feature
(CBS) - Facebook has had friends lists for years now, but hardly anyone really bothered to use them - less than 5 percent of users did, to be exact, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It seemed bothersome to have to scroll through your list of hundreds of followers to tag people accordingly. Who has that kind of time?
But, there has been a change! This week, TechCrunch reported that the social network "had quietly activated a nifty new feature: smart friend lists that use algorithms to generate a handful of lists of your friends, coworkers, acquaintances, and people who live near you."
"The revamp is designed to make Friend Lists easier to manage and and more popular," says Mashable.
So here's how it works: You can create and manage Friend List on the Friends page (seen above).
Facebook will generate for users a handful of smart lists organized by "like" things, such as people you work with, go to school with, you live close to... Then, it's up to you to make lists of your own. As you add new friends, some magic algorithm (oh we love those!) will suggest other people to add to those lists.
There's also a way to make a list extra special. The benefit (other than to be that rudely exclusionary in secret): to be able to see said "special" friends' updates and posts more prominently than the rest. Acquaintances, on the other hand, can be on a separate list, which places them at a level of lower importance. (Sorry!) For those "acquaintances," you'll only see "major" status updates on their pages, such as a change in relationship status or job.
"Today's launch will doubtless draw some comparisons to Google+, which has a strong emphasis on sorting your friends into Circles, which are analogous to Facebook's friend lists," explains TechCrunch. "But despite that emphasis, Facebook has actually beaten Google+ to the punch on recommending who you put into these groups - Google+ is great at surfacing people you might be interested in following, but it doesn't yet do much to help you sort them."
"While these changes feel like an answer to the rise of Google+, the search giant's social network, [Facebook product manager Blake] Ross says that's not the case... He thinks that nobody has done friend grouping right," Mashable reports. "He believes that Smart Lists and automatic friend grouping is a step toward taking away the pain of organizing friends."
Try it out and let us know if you prefer Facebook's Friend List over Google+'s Circles.
