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"With the redesign earlier this year, Facebook shifted to a far more real-time model of keeping up with your friends' activities around the site. Some of the early criticism of the changes put \"information overload\" at the top of the list.\nAt the same time, Facebook introduced an awesome and powerful way to filter your news feed to improve that signal to noise ratio. But in our opinion they didn't quite go the distance in terms of making sure users knew it was available and explaining how to use it. So in this feature we'll take a look at a simple step-by-step walkthrough for setting up friend list filters.\n\nAbout Friend Lists\nThe friend lists feature is simply a way to create groups of Facebook friends, so you can see just the updates from that set of contacts at a time. If you've ever used Groups in TweetDeck or Lists in FriendFeed, they work in essentially the same way.\nIf you go to your Home tab in your Facebook profile, you'll see the leftmost column contains a number of line items or \"filters\" that will change the contents of the central pane. If you have enough items in the list you'll see a \"More\" link at the bottom \u2014 click that and the list will expand. At the bottom you should see a \"Create New List\" link, which you can follow to set up some new friend lists.\n\n\u00A0\u00A0\nHow to Create a Facebook Friend List\nAfter clicking the \"Create New List\" link, a window will pop up prompting you to give your new list a name. The search box in the upper right allows you to search through your friends to find the people you want to add to the list.\n\n\n\n\nClicking on a friend's name or portrait will add them to the list, and their entry will now have a blue box with a checkmark around it to denote that they have been selected as members of this list. You can toggle between \"All\" and \"Selected\" in the upper left to switch between the view of all your friends and the view of which friends you've selected so far for this list.\n\n\n\n\nWhen you've selected all the friends for your list, click the Create List button to complete and create the list. You'll now see it show up as an option in the left-hand sidebar of your Home page. The pen icon to the right of the list name allows you to edit the list again, if you wish at a later time to change the name or add or subtract list members.\nHow to Use Friend Lists\nThis is the easy part: just go to your Facebook Home page and select a friend list to view from the left-hand menu. If you don't see the list you're looking for, click the \"More\" link at the bottom of the stack to expand it.\n\n\n\n\nOnce a list is selected, you'll only see the updates from the people in that list in the center activity pane. This is a very powerful way to drill down into just the people whose updates you want to see, whether you only have 100 friends or 1000.\nFor example, you could create a list for work colleagues, family, close friends, associates from a club or organization, and so on \u2014 and any time you wanted to check in with that group, you can then do so very easily from your Home page without having to sort through lots of other noise.\nHow to Delete a Facebook Friend List\nMaybe you're leaving a workplace or organization you once belonged to, or maybe you've just found a particular list never gets checked. When it comes time to delete a Friend List, you can't currently do that from the same place we just created them (Home), so we wanted to walk you through this somewhat counterintuitive step.\nGo to your Friends tab in your Facebook profile. Here you'll see a list of your friends in the center, with a list of all your Lists in the left-hand column. Note that from this page you can actually also create new lists, and add friends to existing lists using the \"Add to list\" dropdowns to the right of each person's avatar and name.\n\n\n\n\nIf you select a list in the left column by clicking it, you'll see a list of the friends in that list in the middle pane. At the top are three buttons: Create New List, Edit List, and Delete List. Create New and Edit work just as we talked about above.\n\n\n\n\nDelete List will of course delete the list in question. Facebook will prompt you to make sure you really want to do this, with the warning that \"This cannot be undone.\" If you're sure about deleting the list, go ahead and click the Delete List confirmation button; otherwise just hit Cancel to keep your list intact.\n\n\n\n\nAnd that's all there is to it. As you can see, it's not rocket science \u2014 but it's an incredibly easy feature to overlook that has the power to change the signal to noise ratio in your Facebook account. Then, you can also combine your friend lists with privacy settings to atomically determine which of your friends can see which types of updates, without having to manually update each person's settings individually.\nDo you have other tips about Facebook Friend Lists we and Mashable readers ought to know about? Let us know in the comments!\nMore Resources from Mashable\n- HOW TO: Integrate Facebook With Your Blog- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What\u2019s the Difference?- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook- HOW TO: Use Facebook for Professional Networking"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/10/09/create-facebook-friend-lists/>