You’ve got 500 -something friends , all
of about 50 you really interact with .
You went to school with Lucy and
Henry, you’ve worked with Mike for
years , and Joe lives just down the
block . Facebook knows all of this — it
just doesn ’t really go out of its way to
show that it knows all of this . Until
now.
Sometime recently, Facebook began
rolling out “Smart Lists” to select users
— which , as the name implies ,
intelligently groups certain obvious
groups of friends into pre -packaged
lists. Take that, Google Plus!
So far, it looks like Facebook is
automatically grouping friends into
three different bunches :
People you work with
People you attended school with
People who live within 50 miles of
you
If nothing else, that last one should
be pretty handy for finding a few bar
buddies on the quick without bugging
your whole friends list ( or, if we ’re
going for more practical stuff here,
blasting out the cliche “ Oh my God !
Earthquake! Did anyone else feel
that!” updates without sending it out
to people who are on the other side
of the world and obviously didn’t feel
that.)
Following the launch of Google Plus
and its absurdly easy- to-use grouping
system , Facebook has taken a good
amount of flack for their rather archaic
list creation tools . Might this be the
first of many improvements ? The three
pre -generated lists are nice , but when
will I be able to be able to make my
own smart lists, a la iTunes Smart
Playlists? Yeah yeah , school friends ,
cool .
