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Yesterday Facebook released an updated version of their friends page to let users more effectively manage their relationships. While some users were frustrated with the changes (as usual), the new design empowers users to more efficiently manage their many groups of friends. While most users have played with Facebook’s friend lists feature, many have still yet to master the feature. We’ve decided to create a comprehensive guide that outlines how you can take advantage of friend lists to manage relationships and how to make Facebook privacy management much easier using friend lists.
What Changes Did Facebook Make?
By today most users have seen that their friends page has changed and what’s most frustrating for many of them is that they don’t remember how the page used to be, they just know that it’s different. Thanks to Facebook’s new homepage design, many of the features provided within the previous friends page had become duplicate features. You could sort friends by those that had recently updated their profile as well as those that had posted status updates. Now that you can view all of your friends’ status updates from the homepage there isn’t a need for viewing status updates from the friends page.
The new friends page is simply a way to navigate through all of your Facebook friends. There are now 7 views within the friends page: friend recommendations, search, browse by network, browse in alphabetical order, phonebook, recent friends, and friend list filters. We’ll briefly go over these seven views and then go into more detail about friend lists.
Friend Recommendations
After you click the “Find Friends” tab on the new Facebook friends page, you will be presented with what was previously the friend recommendations page. This page is a way for finding existing friends that you haven’t already added by checking your email contact lists as well as automatically recommending friends based on your existing Facebook network.
This is simply the place that you want to visit if you want to find people you know that you aren’t already connected with.
Search
This area is pretty straight forward. Start typing your friends’ name that you are looking for and matches for those friends will instantly start showing up in the friends area. While you can still use Facebook’s existing search box for finding friends, this is a great interface for rapidly searching through all of your connections. Facebook uses an AJAX interface so that as soon as you begin typing, your friends immediately begin getting filtered.
Browse By Network
Facebook has provided you with the ability to sort through your friends based on the networks they belong to. It could be the school they attend (high school or college), the company they work for, or simply a geographic network that they belong to. This feature is also extremely useful for determining what networks you have the highest density of friends within.
While entering a network is optional on Facebook, it’s extremely useful for sorting and searching through existing relationships or searching for new people.
Alphabetical Order
This is a basic way for sorting your friends. If you simply want to browse through your friends in alphabetical order, click on the “All Friends” tab and you’ll be able to sort everybody in order of their name. This isn’t really much of a filtering mechanism and is instead a way to just spend some time browsing your friends.
Once you’ve reached a certain number of friends, browsing by name may no longer be the most efficient method for finding specific individuals in your network.
Phone Book
The phone book view for your Facebook friends page has to be one of the most useful features on Facebook. If you want a great way for keeping up to date with all of your friends’ phone numbers, Facebook is probably the best place to do this. The phonebook view simply provides an alphabetical list of your friends with each of their phone numbers listed out.
If you are looking for a way to get your friends’ phone numbers while on the go, I highly recommend downloading one of Facebook’s mobile applications. I personally use the Facebook for Blackberry application and the Facebook iPhone application but there are many other applications for other mobile operating systems.
Recent Friends
To view your most recent Facebook friend additions, you can simply click on the “Recently Added” tab. This is a great way for viewing new connection trends within your personal network as well as verifying that you’ve accurately grouped each new connection into the proper friend list. Aside from personal trends and keeping up on friend list management, I’m not sure what else you would use this tab for aside for just having another way for browsing through all of your contacts.
Friend List Filters
This is the final and most important view of the Facebook friends area. There are two types of friend list filters: network filters and custom friend lists. Network filters are the default filters that will show up. They are any of the networks that you currently belong to. For instance, I currently live in Washington, D.C. and belong to the D.C. network. I can easily filter through all my friends that belong to that network.
Custom friend lists are the other tool that you can sort by via this view. Since this guide is focused on how to leverage friend lists, I’ll save the details on this for the next section.
What Are Friend Lists?
Aside from networks, users would have no way of filtering all of their friends if it weren’t for friend lists. Each user tends to have their own way of using the friend lists feature which was first introduced to users back in December of 2007. The purpose is to easily group your friends, set custom profile settings based on your connection, and to be able to more effectively browse the site.
With Facebook’s new homepage, users with a lot of friends can quickly become overwhelmed which is why friend lists are so important. With friend lists, you can quickly filter the activities of your various friends. Want to view what all of your friends from high school have been up to recently? Click on your custom “High School” friend list and find out instantly.
Friend List Best Practices
When friend lists were first launched, I quickly began creating lists and now I have duplicate lists and many other types of conflicts within my lists. Don’t make this mistake! If you have a lot of contacts and suddenly want to go back and order all of your friends into lists, the process can be extremely cumbersome. After stumbling around the friend lists feature, I’ve come up with a few best practices for managing your friend lists.
Use Friend Lists As “Friend Tags”
For users with only a few friends, friend lists may not be that important but as you grow your personal network (or “social graph”), having effective friend lists become extremely useful. I recommend using friend lists as tags. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of tagging, check out the social bookmark site delicious as well and the Wikipedia article on tagging.
Contrary to traditional hierarchical classification systems, tags are keywords that help describe an item for finding it again via search or browsing. While you can easily begin “tagging” your friends with countless friend lists, it’s probably not a good idea to go friend list crazy. Right now Facebook doesn’t appear to have a way to group multiple friend lists together, making it challenging to go back once you’ve created a ton of lists.
While it sounds a bit obsessive, I’d recommend writing down a few friend lists that you’d like to create ahead of time so that you don’t overdo it. Standard friend lists include: the context in which you met a person (industry conference, friend parties, random locations (e.g. plane, grocery store, etc)) and affiliation groups (fraternities, clubs, sport groups, work organizations, etc).
Have A Default Set of Privacy Related Friend Lists
In addition to grouping friends based on the context of your relationship and affiliation groups, it’s also important to have specific privacy settings. In our ten tips on Facebook privacy I give a brief outline of how friend lists can be used to manage your privacy settings more effectively.
I suggest also having a few default privacy setting “groups”. The most common would be: professional, family, social, and restricted. You can then customize your privacy settings for each group. Your social friends should probably have unrestricted access to your profile. You typically don’t mind if your close friends have your phone number or are able to view your photos.
Your professional contacts should probably have a more restricted view of your profile. For example, you may want to prevent professional contacts from accessing photos you’ve been tagged in. I explain how to do that in our Facebook privacy guide. The bottom line is that having a few key friend lists with specific privacy settings, simplifies your privacy configuration.
I’ll give one example of a new friend’s friend list configuration. Let’s say I meet a person on a plane on the way back from a conference in California. After meeting them we exchange business cards and I follow up. I proceed to add them on Facebook but it’s probably not a good idea for me to grant that person full access to all my information since I’ve only spoken with them for a couple hours. I’ll add the person to the following friend lists: Travel Contacts, California (because they are from California and I have geographic friend lists), and Professional. The “Professional” friend list is the one that has specific privacy settings that I’ve already configured.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you assign users to multiple friend lists, Facebook will default to the most restrictive privacy settings among those lists. For example: if you have one friend who’s listed in the social and professional group and the “professional” friend list is more restrictive, Facebook will default to those privacy settings when that individual views your profile.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to use Facebook’s friend area and have a basic understanding of Facebook friend lists, you should now be able to more effectively manage your Facebook relationships. If you think of anything that I missed in this guide, please feel free to leave them in the comments!
What I no longer see is the way to see how I know my friends. Has this been removed?
There is one key thing that used to be available on the Friends page that is no longer available.
After the “News Feed” re-design — which was a good idea overall — there is no longer a filter to see only status updates. I figured they would have added one by now, but they haven’t.
On the Friends page, however, you could cheat and still see status updates only. Now, no longer possible.
I am a big fan of Facebook, but IMHO, they need to realize that the News Feed needs ORTHOGONAL filters.
* One set of filters for WHO — Friend lists and networks.
* One set of filters for WHAT — Status updates, links, photos, videos, notes, applications.
I.e. what if I want to see “photos posted by family members”? “links posted by high school friends”?
It wouldn’t be a big change; just re-add the tabs at the top of the friend feed…
Sorry for the rant.
PS — Why does Facebook think that we prefer to see our friends in alphabetical order by “FirstName LastName” rather than “LastName, FirstName”? Shouldn’t this be configurable?
@Raphael: yes, it was removed. However, in its place, they automatically added some friend lists generated from the former relationships.
Sad in a way, but it was a pain in the tush trying to organize relationships and get approval from the other person.
I appreciate this article in which you attempt to explain all the changes that are part of the new Friends page.
I disagree with you as to it being an improvemnt. Some of us were quite capable of arranging and managing our Friends lists in the previous version. Also I now have a geographical friends list–Network list that I have no interest in or any use for that I can not delete. It offends me that it is in the literal top position of all my lists. Also I had a nice arrangement in which I split up a very large grouping of Friends into three separate alphabetical lists (A-H, I-P, Q-Z) and now those are all over the place and not in order and one of them is missing completely from the Friends listing on my Home page. This is not an improvement for me. This is an inconvenient annoyance that I do not want to spend energy reorganizing to try to fix. Already did try and it did not work at all. There have been too many such changes here on Facebook. Is the assumption that no one is smart enough to run their own lives?
Actually I use the Friends Details feature all the time. I don’t think its a pain. And I don’t care if they approve it or not because I can see the info I entered regardless.
I do not add total strangers on Facebook, but often times I do add someone I just met once. Sometimes we end up not interacting after the day we met for months and it is difficult to remember how I met this person. I use Friend Details info to remind myself. I will miss this feature a lot!
Facebook should simply stop doing what they think it’s right, and begin doing what its users want. And more important, don’t do what its users don’t want.
Also @Jim, you can filter WHAT you want to see in your news feed by selecting different applications in the filter. For instance, to see photo stories, click on Photo application, to see the links posted, click on Links application.
Granted you cannot currently do what you are suggesting - combining the WHO and WHAT filters which sounds like a nice idea. Personally though I don’t think I would use it that much. For me the WHAT filters are actually more useful than WHO. But I could see it being different for other people.
@Luigi Trovato (Facebook User): You cannot only listen to your users want. Here is the quote from Henri Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
It is actually kind of annoying that the Friend Lists are in no discernable order, and unlike on the News Feed page, you can’t seem to reorder them.
No, you’re not correct. The home page DOES NOT allow us to see status and profile updates, because it’s bogged down with every single update made by any friend. If someone has a large number of Facebook friends, their home page will turn over every hour. It’s impossible to pick out relevant updates among the sea of quizzes, applications, etc.
So the old friends list with recently-updated profiles was not redundant. I see no reason for you to be a Facebook apologist.
Finally I can find out which of my friends are not in any group at all! This was a major security problem in the past I found, but now it is easy to see. Looks like i will be spending my Friday night re-structuring!
They need to have the ‘updated status’ on their friend list. I like to see what my friends are doing and I don’t mind if others see mine. If you don’t want anyone to see it - don’t post it!
And, in response to the ‘facebook needs to do what people want’…I agree. They wouldn’t be where they are now if all of us users hadn’t joined and liked it. I joined when it came out. (back when it was THEfacebook.com) At least have a vote on big things!
They got rid of “Recently Updated Friends”–I don’t get why. It is absolutely ridiculous. I checked that every day. There is now no way to tell when your friends edit their profile. I know Facebook is all into hating on the profile, but given how much they hate static information, they’re getting rid of the way to tell when it changes! Blurgh. I am so so so so annoyed.
what I find interesting is that I have a group for “Madison Square Church” and another one for “Madison Square CRC”. Both are the same place–the church I go to–and it’s kind of annoying that they’re separated like that (probably based on how people self-identified it).
I was confused at first, thinking I had added these categories without realizing it. Thank God for this blog!
Horsepiss, Nick! When a user clicks on “all friends” from his home menu, what is the logical data to present to the user?
A) Find People You Email
B) Suggestions
C) Search for People
D) Find people you IM
or
E) a list of all friends.
“E” the answer. When a user clicks on a menu item, the result should *at least* resemble the description displayed on the menu. THIS ONE DOES NOT!
And who came up with the idea of sorting the friends list on the first name rather than the last? The choice was arbitrary, non-standard, and annoying. Also, the drop down menu that appears when you hover over “friends” doesn’t work. Software should at least be tested before it’s released.
This is the farthest thing from an improvement facebook has yet to introduce. For those of us with many friends, it is now impossible to see who updated what on their page - the home page does not show EVERYONE, it just shows select things and includes ridiculous results like how fiends did on quizzes. I can no longer see status updates on a tab nor profile updates.
How anyone can see this as a positive is beyond me.
Honestly, I don’t get the obsession with ‘organizing’ my friends … Facebook used to be fun before it was downgraded into Twittster light.
“While some users were frustrated with the changes (as usual), the new design empowers users to more efficiently manage their many groups of friends. While most users have played with Facebook’s friend lists feature, many have still yet to master the feature.”
1).Ouch to the “as usual” comment 2).I don’t care about managing my groups, I just liked seeing recent status updates. Now I have to scroll through 20 quizzes or tests to make sure I have seen all my friends’ status updates. 3).How can we “master” our features when things keep changing?
I liked that i could click on friends and see all my friends status updates. i think someone said i can filter my home page to look this way (without all that other junk showing) but how do i do that?
Please, please, restore the option to just see status updates! I cannot control when a friend posts a quiz or comments on another friend’s update, so it makes my news feed very cumbersome to browse quickly. With the old option to just see status updates, I found Facebook very friendly. Now, I am less interested to wade through it unless I have a lot of time. NOT a good change, in my opinion.
To Raphael, who wrote–You cannot only listen to your users want. Here is the quote from Henri Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Thank god Henry Ford told us what we wanted! The ozone and untold millions of animals and the 50 million people dead in car crashes around the world thank him sincerely. Now, dammit, where would we be without the gun?
I love this new feature.
I only wish they didn’t take down the recent updates about what your friends were doing etc.
I feel grumpy again! Just when I thought that I was an expert in navigating through the endless buttons and prompts on facebook, here comes another feature that forces me to go through endless details I am not interested in. simplicity, anyone?
Something I’m not entirely clear on yet is if it’s TRUE an item I post to a group, say, “family” will only show up for those individuals in that group..? Is this right? I have no way of testing this except annoying contacts with tester requests.
Status updates only are still available in Facebook mobile, which is visible (albeit not pretty) in a standard web browser. Go to http://m.facebook.com/ and click “Friends.” Voila!
This is a complete waste. I log in to Facebook for two reasons: to check if I got messages and to see what my Friends have changed. Now I can’t see what my friend’s have changed. All I get is a constantly-changing “feed.” Whereas before I could see that Joe Schmoe had updated his profile with a “link,” I know have this link shoved on to me in the Feed. I’ve lost my choice to go visit Joe Schmoe’s profile and check it out.
This has two negatives:
1. It makes Joe Schmoe the center of my Facebook universe for the time while I am on the site, viewing the Feed. This doesn’t want to make me come back later and check out how the Feed’s changed; it gets me upset that I have no control and removes my incentive to view worthless information.
2. It crowds out information I would like to see. I want to see what’s going on with Jane Smith. I could easily see if things have changed in the Profile updates part of the Friends tab. Now, I got a feed that Joe Schmoe is dominating with his “5 Favorite Beers Survey.” Did this crowd out potential profile updates from people I actually care about? Are they no longer on the Feed because people like Joe Schmoe are filling out pointless surveys every five seconds, pushing good stuff off the Feed quicker? I have no control where information I care out is crowded off the Feed.
Friends lists are a pain to set up. Why make users set up their features if they add no benefit? “Shortening” the Feed with particular friends lists does nothing to address the “crowding out” or control issues. Like a previous commenter noted, Facebook is more interested in its vision of what a user experience should be like, rather than what users want or how they actually use the site.
Friends listed in alphabetical order by the FIRST name is inane. Our society uses the LAST name. Phone books have been arranged in this manner since Bell & Watson. I don’t want to start typing to find out which Smiths are in my friends list, I want to scroll down to find that out.
Alphabetizing by the first name means that Bill is at the beginning, but if he uses William, he will be at the end. Elizabeth or Liz; Bob or Robert.
Now do you get it? Please correct this “oversight.”
So now, not only are your friends alphabetized by first name (dumb)…when you click on Friends or All Friends at the top of the page you’re taken to that helpful “We’d like to help you find your friends” page (dumber).
I painstakingly organised my Friends list, only to have everything restructured.
The previous feature was much more useful, where I had the choice of adding details such as “Met through ____”. This is no longer possible, which upsets me very much indeed.
So they’ve removed the ability to view Recent Profile Updates, Status Updates and how people know eachother on the friend page… in addition to the removal of the many feed items on the home page in the re-design. Wow, talk about striping out half your functionality. Facebook ftl.
No longer can we live vicariously through others and be virtual stalkers! Hurray!
Thumbs up for making it easier to allocate people to friend lists. But thumbs down for lack of customisation with name ordering, and for killing off the ability to see status updates. I thought the whole idea of the new Twitter-like UI was to make status updates the centre of attention, at the expense of the functionality that used to make Facebook so good? Change of heart?
Put the friends page back like it used to be with friends in alphabetical order by last name and with recent updates.
I want to know how to delete a friend list I no longer want.
I can remove the people in the list. I can remove the name of the list. But an icon and space for the list remains.
OH, I also want to be able to select from among the lists like I can the calendars that show in Google calendar.
My friends list is in alphabetical order — by FIRST name! How do I put it in order by last name? No where in your section on alphabetizing is this mentioned. And I cannot find the answer anywhere — some folks are also struggling with this, while others have their friends automatically put in order by last name.
If your page is available for everyone to see…will people see your friends list.. In other words if I categorize a set of friends as “the dummies” do they see the title of my friend’s list?
How do I change my friends list from first name alphabetical order to last name alphabetical order???
does anyone know why it says that you need to “add them as a friend ” to see thier profile and for some it says you need to “add him/her as a friend” i know its because of the privacy settings but it was the different wording thats used “them for some people even though its one person and sometimes its says him/her “
Am I missing something?? Many friends have their lists according to last name. Mine only show by FIRST name. This is very awkward. Sometimes one forget nicknames, etc., and I could easily click through everyone in my family, using last name. Now, my family is strung throughout the list. A kazillion other people are also trying to figure out how we can change to alphabetical last name. It’s very difficult to use, and has no rhyme or reason. Surely, there’s a way, as I know about 25 of us right now that are looking to change ours….
I have a question…If the friends detail feature has been removed, how is it that when i see friends list(’all friends’) of a friend who is on my list; i can see on the top it says show (choose and option) and for eg if you click on school friends then facebook shows all the friends of my friend who he has gone to school with and under his friends names i can see the old friends detail that probably they had put; Like they went to school together, they dated, they lived together etc. How is that possible? So is there still a way to access the friends detail feature? I would appreciate an answer to my quiery.
Thanks!
Is there any way you can organize friends alphabetically by last name? Doing it by first name means family members who share a last name are mixed in with everyone else instead of being grouped together. Having friends sorted by first name is hugely annoying.
I have some rowdy friends, and some prim and proper friends, and then also young relatives as friends. I would like to seperate them into casual and formal friends, and make it so formal friends can’t see what the rowdy friends comment and post. I’d like to be given an opportunity to check boxes of friend categories ( casual, formal kids ) before posting something, so only casual friends see some stuff. I have to be all proper all of the time because I have some stodgy (work and school) friends that I dont want to… overwhelm with the casual or even just silly side of my personality.
How do I make sure that certain people do not have access to seeing a list of my friends. I initially added several names to the customized list but since then, I haven’t been able to add new names to the list successfully even after I tell it to “save”. When I go see what added names see, they can still see who my friends are. I don’t want any of my friends to see my complete friends list. It’s okay if they see who our mutual friends are but not a complete list. On the “privacy” page there is not a “no one” option to choose for “friend’s list” only “cutonize” so I add names but lately, I haven’t been able to make them stick. I go back to see what they can see on my page and a complete list of friends still shows up. Like I said before, I don’t want any of my frineds to see my complete list of friends. Please help.
Is there a way to stop friends from joining your page automatically?
I am unable to delete THE FIRST friend in my Facebook friend list. When I hit the “X” to delete, it just jumps to that person’s page. This is frustrating, as I really want to get rid of this individual whose name is the first one alphabetically. HALP!
Hi all. I have a serious problem and i need some expert advice. On my pc i can see all my friends status updates but on my mobile it only shows updates for friends within my network (nigeria). this is all so very confusing. Pls help
Got a question:
I’ve mistakenly hit the “X” from a friend in my “all friends” list, which removed her entirely from my network.
How do I get that friend back? Also, when I search for her, I can no longer find her.
I’m sure there’s a simple answer here?
So how do I actually gain access to the settings that allow what a friend group can see??
Hello and why don’t all you whiners just shut up about the alphabetical order by first name! This is not the telephone book! It is Facebook! Maybe you haven’t noticed but computers are changing almost daily and Facebook has to make changes to adjust to these chages as well. My comment is about the change in the friends list. Three days ago my friends list screwed up and I don’t know what is wrong with it! My sons and husbands works fine but mine, when I push all connections my page comes up blank! I can pull up my game site friends pages and they show all my friends on my profile and my friends for that game highlighted but once again I can not delete them. Please don’t tell me I have to install Firefox because that is BULL! My son and husband don’t have it installed and all it does is screws up my computer more than my friends list is screwed up! Someone please reply! Thank You
Tam, I wouldn’t expect any helpful answers if I were you. Your opening statement doesn’t endear you to many Facebookers! What say you?
I want to email all my friends and I have to sit and manually highlight them all which takes ages. I even created a list and it doesnt work was just trying to send my friends a joke to cheer up their day. Also I hate the way when you message a few people it includes everyones names there is no BCC thats something Facebook should try to improve on.
My friend dropped off my visual list, but I can still do a search, find her and access her. I also see her as having me as a friend on her profile. So how do I see her on my friend list again?
i dont want anyone to find me wen they search my name i did that…but i also want to block people who are not on my friends list to see my name on my friends list how do i go about hiding my name so only my friends can c me on there list but not people who are not my friends