Facebook Improved Friend Lists : Improved Sharing and Listening

An article by Zeeshan    2 Comments

Facebook recently rolls out some major updates to control your privacy on the facebook. Which means now you can control your sharing audience. A much awaited updated from facebook. Many facebook users were annoyed to facebook’s privacy where you have to share all the stuff with only one category FRIENDS. Although friends list usually consist of class mates, co-workers, family, etc. but facebook forced to put them under one category of friends. Thanks to Google plus whose many privacy features created a lot of buzz and people were searching for invitations to get the hands on the new shiny social networking player. Google Plus Circles is the one feature which made it really easy to sort the people as we sort them in real life. Also sharing is made much easier.  The other great features are the better image viewing and Hangouts. Mostly, people acknowledge the great new features of Google Plus. This forces the facebook to integrate all these features into facebook to plug the possible facebook to Google Plus migration. Here, the list of the some features which facebook introduced after the launch of Google Plus.

1. Video Calling feature added to facebook chat.  Google Plus provided this feature in Google Plus Hangouts.

2. Facebook Messenger answered the Google Plus Huddle.

3. Bigger and faster photos in facebook which totally resemble to better image navigation in Google Plus.

4. Finally major privacy updates to make it easy to share with who you want. This includes the improvement in privacy settings,  Make the sharing control more visual, and now you can sort the contacts(friends) in lists as in circles in Google Plus.

Google Plus is still in limited test and not public, but it makes the competitors think . It seems hard that Google Plus will force most of the facebook users to migrate, but it forces the facebook to make improvements in the service.

New Improved Friend Lists in Facebook

Facebook new improved list feature make it easy to share with exactly the people you want to share and listen to the people you want to listen. Previously, the news feed was always filled with updates from all the contacts (friends) and sharing with rite people was not easy. There are many improvements in new friend lists.

Smart Lists

First of all, there are smart lists, which will be now automatically created based on the common things in your and your friend’s profiles. Like if there are co-workers which have given the name of the company in their profile. The new smart list will be created with the name of the company. Similarly, if there  is common college or university in your profile and friend’s profile then the new list will be created with the college or university name. However, you can add or remove people from the list, rename the list, merge or delete the list at any time.

Close Friends and Acquaintances list

Now you can see a new list created with the name close friends and acquaintances. These lists will help you to define which people or friends are important to you and, which are lesser. Also you will listen more from close friends and lesser from the acquaintances list. So you will get everything in news feed from the people in the close friend list, and you can receive even notifications for the people in close friend list so you do not miss anything from them. However, you get only important updates in the news feed from the people in your acquaintances. The important will be decided by the facebook.

Restricted List

The people in the list will only get updated from you when you will post anything public. Also people in the list will not be notified that you have put them in the restricted list.

How to Manage New Friend Lists

You can find the new improved list in the left-side  bar of facebook home. Also you can access the lists by visiting this link when you are logged in to your facebook account. Here, you can find lists.

To create the new list you can go to the Create a List button on the top right. To manage a list go the list by clicking on it.

Click on Manage list on the top right side to manage the list.

Here you can add/remove friends to the list.

Merge lists gives you the option to merge this list into other list. However after merging the list, the list will be deleted.

Choose updates type is the enhanced feature from Google plus circles. Here you can select what type of updates you want to receive from the people in the list.

Notifications button will allow you to turn off or on the notifications for the list.

Facebook will also give the suggestions for people to add the list in the right sidebar. You can go to the bottom link See More Suggestions to go through all the suggestion by the facebook.

You can also add the important lists to favorites in facebook to easily access the list from favorite tab.

Share Things With New Improved Friends Lists

After sorting the friends in different lists you can view the feed of each list. Every list will have it’s own feed where you will get the posts, videos,  pictures, etc. from the people in the list.

Also now when sharing the things you can select the list or lists to share with set of people.  So if you want to share something with co-workers which you do not want to share with anyone else you can simply do it by selecting the co-workers list. Similarly, you can share the things with family without letting know anyone else on the facebook.

Also if you want to redefine the audience for something previously shared on facebook simply go to the profile and select the audience for the drop-down  button present against each post in your profile.

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