In a few hours, Facebook will roll out changes to one of its main areas, “Friends,” designed to make it easier and more obvious as to how to add friends, make Friend Lists and edit those lists. This is important as filtering is a key part of the newly redesigned homepage, and up until now it’s been a bit confusing for some users as to how to create these lists.
The specific changes to the area involve moving “Create New List,” “Edit List,” and “Delete List” buttons to the top of the area above your list of friends. Clicking on the Create New List button will open an overlay that allows you to click on friends’ faces to add them to this new list. You can also type in their name and have them show up. Editing an existing friend list is just as easy.
But something else really interesting that Facebook is doing is that it is now auto-populating some lists for you, if you don’t have any. It’s doing this by using the details you entered when you confirmed a friendship with someone — the “How do you know this person?” question. This auto-generation of lists will no doubt spur more usage of them and will hopefully help less savvy users figure out how to use them to make the site more manageable.
When you visit this new Friends area, you’ll also see at the very top of the page a big box to help you find friends that you email most often. Below this, is the Suggestions area which lists several people Facebook thinks you may be friends with based on your existing connections. You can also find people based on what school you went to and also based on their IM name on various services.
Friend lists have existed in one form or another on Facebook since 2007. Their most obvious usage before the redesign was to give different friends different privacy settings, to modify what they could or could not see. But as I mentioned, these lists are now just as important for your own experience on Facebook, to filter the social stream. All of your Friend Lists will now show up on the left hand sidebar of the main page. You can easily rearrange these lists by dragging them into new positions. The top one will be your default view of the Facebook News Feed.
Facebook is quick to note that your friends will not be able to see what lists you’ve put them in. So when you add Jim to your “Dumbass” list, you’ll be fine unless he’s looking over your shoulder when you’re signed into your own account.
Check out the screenshots and a video below.
Wow an update that doesn’t directly target Twitter, finally!
I dunno, it kind of mirrors TweetDeck, so you could argue that it does target Twitter
not even 1% will use this feature.. in fb its default that rules 99.9%
Yeah, I’d say it sort of is related considering how important this is to the redesign.
of what use is the Friend’s list when you cannot send a message to all of them or invite all to a group once they are above 100?
Facebook = copying every aspect of Twitter…. except for its simplicity.
Not impressed so far. Not able to view “all friends” without first creating and adding them into a filtered list. For those people with a lot of friends this is going to be very time consuming. Surely being able to view them all then filtering down to reduce the viewable list would have been more logical.
Are you already seeing the new update?
yes!
Having had more chance to play with it I’m getting used to it. Was just a bit annoying to select “friends” expecting to see a view of “all friends” and instead suddenly have lots of pop up boxes to deal with and new lists to create.
A bit of advance notice before they make yet MORE redesign changes would be good! I think they must roll updates out to the UK earlier than elsewhere as it’s the 2nd time I’ve had changes before friends overseas…
Yes! http://hadakush...d-facebook.html
I’d be happy for a “friends not in a list” option.
And yet you still can’t add ‘public profiles’ to a list, so it’s virtually impossible to keep track of them.
Facebook seem to make a huge song and dance over tiny details while completely ignoring the bigger picture.
yup…more great news on the Web 2.0 front. Facebook is possibly worth 40 billion dollar,s but not a bubble whatsoever. No recession in the Silicon Valley http://iamned.com/blog/ keep buying stocks
I Personally hate and feel people should write their true feelings about it, seeing status of all my friends at the same time was what made facebook fun , facebook had that feature first , then myspace saw people enjoyed that feature and added it , if u feel like me join groups complain post in forums say how we truly feel bout it , otherwise facebook will just get duller and duller as we let them turn it into what i see equivalent of an email box with a adress book if it keeps going like that and dulling up communication
They just keep making things worse it seems. I usually clicked “Friends” to see the status updates and then would click “recently updated” to see of profile changes. This seems to be impossible now. Does anyone know how?
From the facebook help page (http://www.face...lp.php?page=851):
Q: Where are my friend details?
A: With recent changes to the site, friend details have been converted to Friend Lists. To simplify the conversion process, any extra data you filled out after checking the box may have been lost. [...]
I wonder whether they’ll ever get it. First asking users to enter data and then deleting it is no way to make others trust you. What’s next?
I concur. User-generated information, particularly of this kind is very important for any “evil-empire” corporation.
Can you imagine the outrage if this happened at Google?
How do we see all of our friends status’s at once now? Nobody I know likes this. Please change it back.
I just want to know WHY on Earth it isn’t alphabetical by last name. I was just in the middle of a grand revamping of all of my address books, alphabetically, and I was using Facebook as my guide. This morning–BAM! Nope, can’t do that any more. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it’s like EVERY OTHER directory service on the planet, don’t break it.
really, thats what you get for using a web app. they can change right under your feet and you have no say in it.
at least with a desktop app, you can choose not to install the latest version
Try the FriendCSV app and export your friends info into Excel.
http://apps.fac...iendcsv/?ref=ts
Has anybody noticed that the new friends list completely replaces the “Friend Details” (”How do you know this person?) feature? Any friend details entered that didn’t involve obvious categories like “High School” have disappeared forever.
Every time Facebook “adds” a feature, they take away a feature I was actually using. I wish those fuckers would stop that.
How do i see status updates now ?
you don’t
details about your friends are now in your news feed (along with details about all the stupid applications they’ve been playing with so need to sort the wheat from the chaff). I’ve found the quickest/easiest way to view status updates is via the facebook link on Twitter (think it might be a power twitter option?)
You can leave feedback about seeing your friends status updates here…
http://www.face...form=ui_friends
I know this post is old, i just got tried to do some ‘friends organizing’ and realized how stupid this is.
Unless i missing something (which if thats the case, than it’s still stupid b/c what i’m missing wasn’t apparent enough), then the creating friends lists function has extremely limited ability when it comes to filtering friedns (which is supposedly it’s purpose).
Why isn’t there a simple way to “add all friends from the ‘blank’ network” to a newly created friends list. Or “add all male friends,” or “add all who graduate in the year ‘blank’.”
It should be simple enough for me to search through ALL my friends using advanced search options like, sex, age, network, school year, concentration, relationship status, etc. (i recall that this has been available before). Then i should be able to add those results to a ‘friends list.’
I have over a thousand friends, and not b/c im a friend whore, i literally know or have met probably 98% of them. If i wanted to make a ‘friends list’ for only one network, i’d have to go through all those little picture clicking only those people in that network. Thats ridiculous.
stupid