The Facebook Series #1 - Organising Your Friends Lists

The Facebook Series is targeted at people who loves using Facebook but has no clue about the deeper details of Facebook. Facebook has become an integral part of our lives. It is important that we know what it can do for us and what it does behind our backs. Knowing Facebook well increases your efficiency of connecting with people and teaches you to guard your privacy. The Facebook Series will be touching on organising your Facebook account, privacy issues and controls and some easter eggs on Facebook. I'll add more stuff if I come across issues that are worth talking about.

The Facebook Series #1 is a simple introduction on organising your Friends. Actually, most people know about this feature. Majority are just too lazy to do up their Friends List. Having an organised Friends List can help you a lot. A well sorted out list can reduce the work you have to do when you send messages or when you set privacy settings. These will be shown below.

Click on Account on the top right hand corner and click on Edit Friends to go into your Friends List.

On the top right hand of the page, click on the Create A List button and you'll see this box pop out. Type in the name of your list where it says "Enter a name" and click to select which friends you want to include into a list. A Friend can be included in more than one list.

On the main Friends List page, you can also add people into lists by clicking on the Edit Lists button.

You can see which friends are included in a certain list by clicking on the Lists shown on the left side bar. Notice how I have a list of friends called "Ignored On Street List". Let's face it, not all your Facebook Friends are your friends. Some of your Friends are not really a friend, yet, at least. There are certain things you just wouldn't want the whole world to know. Thus it is important to have a list of people whom you feel that you aren't comfortable with letting them into your personal world.

What happens when you want to share a message or a photo which you don't want certain people to know? Before you Share anything, click on the lock button, choose Custom.

In the above option, type the person whom you don't want to see your stuff into the "Hide this from these people". Here's the convenient part if you had created your list properly. Instead of typing the long list of all your colleagues into the box when you want to share a message badmouthing a fellow colleague, you can just create a list and type in the name of the list into the box. You can choose who you want to "Make this visible to" too. Either way works.

IMPORTANT: The "Hide this from" takes priority over "Make this visible to". This means that if person X is both in your List in "Make Visible to" and in "Hide this from", X will NOT be able to see the stuff that you shared. This is good news.

NOTE: You should NEVER include your network unless you love letting the whole world know about what you think. More on this in the next Facebook Series.

Another way that Lists can help you is when you want to send out messages to a group of Friends. Let's say you are organising a gathering with your secondary school CCA friends, instead of typing everyone's names, you can just type in the name of the List into the "To" box when you send a message. The disadvantage is if there is someone whom you do not want to message, you cannot remove just that one person from the list when you send the message.

Organising your Friends Lists is troublesome especially if you have a gazillion Friends. However, take it from me that once you sit down and settle everything properly, maintaining your lists will become easy. Each time you add a new friend, you will be asked which Lists you want to put him in. Well organised Friends Lists will go a long way.