Two readers recently sent me tips on how to solve a couple of the Facebook problems I've written about in the past.

For The Latest on How To Unhide Friends on Facebook, Julie alerted me to what I believe is a somewhat recent feature that I hope will solve the problem for all those people for whom my other suggestions won't work.

Update 11/22/09: It seems like the News Feed link no longer appears on my Friends page, so this step may not work. However, I'm leaving it here because it wouldn't be the first time that some Facebook users have options that others don't, so it wouldn't hurt to see if you have it.

• From the top nav bar, click Friends > All Friends.
• In the left-hand nav bar, under Lists, click News Feed.
  
• Click the Edit List button at the top of the page. This will pop up a window that lists all the friends, Pages, and applications that you've previously hidden. Simply click the Add to News Feed button beside any one that you want to add back.

And Fern sent me several great suggestions in response to Sending Messages to Facebook Friend Lists with More than 20 Members.

• I've organized my groups of generic friends into 20-person clusters by *geography* (rather than group 1, group 2, etc) so that when I'm doing a book tour, I can easily Facebook all my friends in Los Angeles (Los Angeles 1, Los Angeles 2, etc.) or Chicago depending on where I'm going.
• I've organized many of my other friends by profession (which is how I text them); so for example, I have one friend list of librarians, one friend list of independent bookstores, one friend list of journalists, and so forth.
• Rather than messing with all this, if you have your friends all sign up to be members of a group (I run the "writing and publishing" group on Facebook, so many of my friends are there) you can message all of them anytime you like.
• You can also post to the walls of any friends who are signed up on a fan page. That has pluses and minuses—it's less private than the messages you can send to members of a group, but it means you're distributing the message to the walls of all those fans, thus possibly exposing your message to many more people.

Thanks Julie and Fern for taking the time to send along your tips so I can share them with other readers.

And if anyone else finds another solution to any of the issues I've written about, please do send them to me as well.

Posted in Facebook,How To,Reader Answers,Social Media