Facebook has allowed users of the social networking web site the option to organize their friends via lists for a while, but trying to organize those lists in the web site"s user interface has always been a bit of a chore. On Tuesday, Facebook admitted on its blog site that in the past " ... you"ve told us how time consuming it is to organize lists for different parts of your life and keep them up to date." To that end it has revamped the Friends list section, adding a number of new features.
One new addition is the Smart List feature. This allows the site to automatically create lists for users based on the profile information of your friends. The four Smart List categories, at least for now, are for Work, School, Family and City. Users can go in and manually edit the various Smart Lists once they are generated by Facebook.
Yet another new addition is the Close Friends and Acquaintances lists. If you put in a person in your Close Friends list on Facebook you should see all of their posts in your News feed. If you put a person in the Acquaintances list, you will see only important posts from those people (such as if they get married) in your News feed. Facebook will also offer its own suggestions on which friends to put in either list but ultimately it"s up to the user to make that choice.
Finally Facebook is giving users the option to put friends on the Restricted list. That means those folks will only see your public posts on their News feed. This new feature will still allow users to message and tag their friends on the Restricted list. If you have already created a Friends list on Facebook that list should still be available.