It’s official: Facebook has launched new and improved friend lists.
The social network posted a blog entry summarizing the improvements:
- Smart lists – You’ll see smart lists that create themselves and stay up-to-date based on profile info your friends have in common with you–like your work, school, family and city.
- Close friends and acquaintances lists – You can see your best friends’ photos and posts in one place, and see less from people you’re not as close to.
- Better suggestions – You can add the right friends to your lists without a lot of effort.
These improvements ought to help Facebook get more people to use friend lists. And like our most esteemed sibling blog, Inside Facebook, brilliantly puts it:
As friend list usage increases beyond the current five percent of Facebook’s membership, people will likely share more personal, professional and local content with relevant audiences rather than spam friends on the other side of the country about making dinner plans, or offend co-workers or family with racier photos and jokes.
Smart lists go hand-in-hand with the recent placement of privacy controls in the area where people share content with their friends.
These changes together aim to help people become more comfortable with privacy on Facebook.
Readers, what do you make of these changes to the site — will they help people feel better about privacy on Facebook?
Based on user studies and the growth of Facebook, it's clear with new features like Chat and growing friend numbers that users want to be able to manage privacy settings inline, to the people they want to grant or restrict access to.
The general list categories, are definitely helpful as starting points for the 95% people not using it (due to laziness or confusion). Their Smart Lists instantly manage coworker and city lists, for example, which you can tweek. You will still have the ability to manage your own lists, and once the improvements are rolled out — you will be able to access them more easily.
The biggest improvement, from what I've seen, is that Friend Lists are now 10x more accessible. (Managing them used to be hell.) I work for a company that conducts remote usability tests and we had 5 users test the old Facebook. In Part II we discuss results from testing Groups and Friend Lists. http://www.usertesting.com/201... It's clear improvement was needed. Note: Facebook did not use UserTesting to conduct their usability tests (our users sign NDAs upon request).
Comment by Liz Carlson — September 13, 2011 @ 12:57 pm
How do you use it? or make it active?
Comment by Downtown Dan — September 13, 2011 @ 2:58 pm
These actually aren't as "new" as you'd think. Some of these features used to be available until Facebook ripped them out one day last year. I used to love the features, so glad to see there back and even easier to use.
But let's be honest… there is only one reason Facebook suddenly cares about making privacy easier… Google Plus. A little competition always helps.
Comment by Bruce Namerow — September 13, 2011 @ 3:49 pm
True, that is also the only good thing I can say about Google+
Comment by @Twitboydk — September 14, 2011 @ 1:09 am
Hmm, sounds like life to me…
Comment by Afi — September 14, 2011 @ 4:25 am
Looking similar to concept of Google circles. Copy cats!
Comment by Henry Louis — September 14, 2011 @ 6:12 am
Looking forward to it.
I find it more useful then the old lists, and it seems like it will be easier now since you can add friends directly to a list when sending a friend request.
Comment by Asaf Biton — September 14, 2011 @ 8:37 am
[...] sure there are still public status updates going up — now that the Facebook has made the privacy controls more visible to the average user, these settings ought to increase in [...]
Pingback by Coming Soon To Facebook: Subscribe To Non-Friends — September 14, 2011 @ 4:10 pm
solves the wrong problem
Comment by ahoving — September 14, 2011 @ 5:16 pm
[...] sure there are still public status updates going up — now that the Facebook has made the privacy controls more visible to the average user, these settings ought to increase in [...]
Pingback by UPDATE: Facebook Suggests Subscribing To Profiles — September 14, 2011 @ 7:10 pm
The smart list seems to have left out my entire family!!! Now I have to re-friend them ALL….
Comment by Lynda Rider LaCasse — September 17, 2011 @ 2:34 am
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The thing that concerns me is that the featured friends list (i.e. making some of my custom lists public) appears to have suddenly been ripped out of this service at the same time, which is disappointing. They may be taking ideas from G+, but they're not leaving in the good stuff they already have.
Comment by sxa — September 20, 2011 @ 2:32 pm
[...] until smart friend lists are active for you on Facebook. (If you open your page to subscriptions, you’ll likely get smart lists soon if not [...]
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