I didn't even know about this feature until recently, but it's a really useful one that's become even more valuable with the addition of filters to the home page, as I discussed in my post yesterday:
Using the new Facebook Home Page Pt. 2.

Basically, Friend Lists are just groups of people who have something in common in terms of their relationship to you. So you might have a list for your relatives, one for your high school friends, another for your work colleagues, etc. You could even create a list with a totally random collection of people if you wanted, although I can't think of why someone would want to. :)

Creating Friend Lists

Click the Friends link in the top nav bar.

You'll go to a page that lists all your friends with their status lines.

Click the Make a New List link on the left.

You'll be prompted to give the list a name—e.g. Family, School, Knitters—whatever attribute this group of friends has in common. I'm going to create a list that includes only my friends from Canada, so that's what I'm naming mine.

Once you've given your list a name, hit Enter.

Add friends to the list.

A page comes up where you can choose which friends to add to this list. You can either add them individually by typing their names in the text box, or click the Select Multiple Friends list to get a window that displays all your friends. Then just click on all the people you want to add.

If you have a bajillion friends, you can filter the list first based on a variety of networks.

Once you've added everybody you want, click the Save List button.

Note: If you added people individually, there's no Save List button. As soon as you've typed in a person's name and clicked Enter, that person is added to the list.

That's it! You've now created your first Friend List. You can make as many as you want and the same friend can be on multiple lists as well.

If you want to delete somebody from the list, click the X at the right-hand side of their entry. The other icon beside it is to toggle between the current view and an expanded one that shows your friends' larger pictures and some basic info about them.

To delete a list altogether, click the Delete This List link at the bottom of the page.

Using Friend Lists

As you can see in the graphic above, you can send a message to everyone in the list at once by clicking that link. I don't think I need to explain the benefits of this feature. :)

You can also invite an entire list to join a group or attend an event from within those applications. The name of your Friend List(s) will simply appear in the list of friends to choose from.

Another time you might want to use a Friend List is with your Privacy settings. I'll be covering this topic in tomorrow's post.

Finally, as we saw in yesterday's post, you can filter the updates on your home page by Friend Lists. This may be the most valuable use of this feature, just in case you happen to have some Facebook friends whose updates are a little more interesting to you than others. Of course, that doesn't apply to ME... :)

If you have any questions about Friend Lists, shoot me an e-mail. Otherwise, stay tuned for tomorrow's entry, where I'll be discussing some of the privacy control features that Facebook offers.

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Updates

One thing I should have mentioned is that Friend Lists are for your eyes only, i.e. no one else can see what lists you've created and who's on them (well, unless someone else has access to your FB account). So if you want to create a list called "People I Felt I Had To Friend but Don't Really Like," you don't have to worry that anyone on that list will know about it. Likewise, if you boot somebody off your "My Favourite People in the Whole Wide World" list, that person will not be alerted to the change. :)

Posted in Facebook, How To