Facebook announced yesterday on “Improved Friend Lists”- The social network will organize automatically lists of the user’s friends based on the interaction level and the relationship with them and will offer better manual friends sorting options. Did someone mentioned “Circles”…?
Actually, The new lists feature is an upgrade to the privacy and sharing changes Facebook made last month. So far, it has been released to a limited number of users and will spread to all members in the next couple of weeks. This is how the lists suppose to appear:
Sorting To Lists
The “Smart Lists” will be created automatically according to the interaction of the user with his different friends- Facebook will guess the relationship between them and the user could manually make changes as he sees fit. “The Smart Lists” will be divided to 4 categories: “Work”, “School”, “Family” and “City”.
Additionally, the user will have two more lists to manually sort his friends- “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances”. “Close Friends” will get the most focus on the News Feed while only important posts and updates from “Acquaintances” will appear on the News Feed. The user will also be able to define friends as “Restricted” and they will see only public posts and updates.
This is how it will look when the user will share something with his lists:
When the user will create new connections (Add/Confirm friend request), he will be able to add the new connection to his lists. This is for example how it will appear when sending a friend request:
Final Thoughts
Facebook understands the advantages of using Google+ and adjusting towards it, adjustments and changes that probably would have not occur unless the social networks competition. It doesn’t matter what is your reactions to Google+, the competition only benefits with the users!
If you asked yourself why Facebook generate automatic smart lists and not let the users create them by themselves, i assume that this is because the users of Facebook already have hundreds and thousands of friends unsorted, unlike Google+ where the users sort their friends to “Circles” straight from the start, so Facebook offer an automatic solution.