How To Understand And Control Your Faceook Friend Lists

Facebook friend lists are the cornerstone of privacy on Facebook. While you don’t need to take advantage of friend lists, understanding this feature will instantly turn you into a “Facebook power user”. Understand that friend lists can take time to configure so don’t expect to breeze through this step. The concept behind friend lists is simple: it’s a way of organizing your friends into various affiliation groups. If you aren’t clear with our explanation though, here’s how Facebook describes friend lists:

“Friend Lists provide organized groupings of your friends on Facebook. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can filter your view of each list’s stream of activity separately on the home page. Friend Lists are easy to manage and allow you to send messages and invites to these groups of people all at once.”
 
As I previously wrote, there are a few key things to understand about friend lists:

• You can add each friend to more than one Friend List
• Friend Lists should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
• Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

The most common lists that many privacy experts will refer to are “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”, however there’s a limitless combination of lists that you can create. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter how many friend lists you create, although I prefer to simplify things as much as possible. The key thing to understand is that your friends’ privacy settings will always default to the most restrictive friend list they’ve been placed in.

For example, let’s say your friend John is someone you met at work but continue to hang out with outside of work. You may have placed them in your “Work Contacts” Friend List and your “Local Friends” Friend List. If your “Work Contacts” cannot see photos you’ve been tagged in and your “Local Friends” can, John will not be able to see the photos you’ve been tagged in.

You can configure your friend lists by visitng the friends area of your Facebook.