Facebook’s List Team announced changes to the website’s friend lists last night. As usual with Facebook, the results are, well, let’s just call them mixed.
The Good: Smarter lists are a welcome sign. Rather than having to populate the lists yourself (definitely a first world problem), Facebook automatically does that based on similarities in alma mater, workplace, location, and family. You can add and remove friends that Facebook misidentifies.
I’m actually looking forward to this upgrade. It’s a pretty clear response to Google Plus’s Circles feature and takes Circles a step further with automation. Fortunately, Facebook continues to allow users to keep the lists they’ve already created, though I’d expect to see them fall out of use if the new smarter lists work as advertised.
Of course, not all lists are based on information found in a friend’s profile. I have a friend list for members of a message board I frequent and another for friends in a specific political movement. One would assume that Facebook can’t figure those out, unless the new algorithm cross-references shared friends, which could be problematic if accuracy varies.
The Bad: One feature I’m not too keen on most likely carries over from the Facebook Android app, which was just updated Sunday. This iteration of the app removed the ability to make an update visible to more than one friend list well as the ability to exclude a list.
So, if you want an update to be seen by school friends and family members, you have to send it twice. If you want a dirty joke to be seen by everybody but your church friends (NOT THAT I WOULD EVER DO THAT), you’ll have to send it to every group individually rather than just sending to everyone except that group. That’s particularly troublesome, because it disallows the kind of cross-pollination of friends that makes Facebook unique.
Again, this is informed speculation, based on the just-released Android app update. Hopefully, I’m wrong and Facebook returns filtering capability to the Android app.
WTF: I’ll let you see what the Facebook team said in their blog for yourself.
When you post something to a list that you’ve created — including your Close Friends and Acquaintances lists — no one will be able to see the title of the list. The people on the list you’ve shared with will be able to see each others’ names.
This concerns me on a WTF level.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t let just anybody see his friends list. Now, the site’s design defeats its own privacy settings, showing a partial or full friends list to everybody who can see an update. It’s nice that friends can’t see the name of the list, but giving everyone access to my friends list which I specifically choose not to share violates the trust users offer to Facebook.
It seems like every time Facebook updates their software, there’s a major piece that they have to walk back within a week. I hope the team pulls this one back sooner rather than later.
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