Recently, we’ve been preaching the benefits of organizing your Facebook (
) friends into lists to give you better control over privacy and information overload. Now, Facebook is making it easier for you to take advantage of these settings, with a redesign of its “Friends” page (one of the main links in Facebook’s navigation).
Most notably, Facebook is attempting to do much of the heavy lifting for you, by automatically organizing some of your friends into lists, if you’ve been consistently answering the “How do you know this person?” question that Facebook asks when you accept a friend request.
These lists have lots of implications. For one, you can restrict certain parts of your profile – like photos and videos – to only a select group of people (say, “People I trust my life with!”). Additionally, on your homepage, you can set one of these groups as your default when you login, meaning you’ll only see updates from “Close Friends” on your homepage if you want.
In addition to lists, Facebook has added an aggregation of “Suggested Users” on the “Find People You Know” area of the Friends page. These recommendations already show up on your homepage, but now there are more of them, with both profiles and pages (i.e. – brands and celebrities) mixed together. As before, these seem to be generated based on multiple friends already having a relationship with them.
Ultimately, this update looks to address one big concern with the current Facebook – that it’s overwhelming. The easier Facebook makes it to take advantage of lists, the more utility people will get out of the site, so it’s easy to see where they are coming from with these changes.
