Facebook allows users to manage friends into different groups, called Friend Lists. Friend Lists are one of the most powerful features in Facebook, however, not many facebook users effectively use it. By organizing friends into lists you would be able to use fine grained privacy settings for different lists.
Facebook describes friend lists as:
Friend Lists provide organized groupings of your friends on Facebook. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can filter your view of each list’s stream of activity separately on the home page. Friend Lists are easy to manage and allow you to send messages and invites to these groups of people all at once.
Create a Friend List
If you want to create a Friend List, you can do so by going to your Facebook Friends page and simply clicking on the Create New List button at the top. Once a Friend List is created you would see a drop down menu titled “Add to List” in front of the names of all your friends. You can add friends to the List, just by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting the list that you just created.
One thing to understand here is that Friend Lists are similar to tags, so you can create multiple friends lists and add a single friend to more than one Friend List. This could be done by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting all the lists to which this friend belongs.
Privacy Settings in Multiple Friend Lists
If a friend is a part of multiple lists his privacy settings would default to the most restrictive Friend List. In order to understand this, lets assume that you had a friend named Peter, whom you added to “University Friends” and “Work Contacts”. Now if you have set your privacy settings such that your “University Friends” can see your photos but not your “Work Contacts”, Peter wont be able to view your photos. Knowing this, it might be a good idea to not put friends into multiple lists, since things could become confusing. Another work around could be to have three lists “University Friends”, “Work Contacts” and “University Friends + Work Contacts” and have the privacy settings of the last list to be the same as that of the most liberal list.
1 Trackback or Pingback for this entry:
[...] tab on Facebook. At the top of that page there is an option to “+ Create a List”. Make different lists of friends based on who they are and what type of information you want to send their way (or [...]