LAZ|ography

Out of Facebook’s recent improvements comes one that I consider one of its most useful to date. Facebook have now granted users the ability to group their friends into ‘lists’ - user created groups of friends.

The new settings give users the ability to segregate their several-hundred (or thousand) strong contact lists into various groups, allowing them to change privacy settings and send messages to selected ones en-masse. In short, these new group settings will let users hide parts of their profile from some friends while allowing others full access. 

With these new changes in action, users will, for instance, be able to stop the likes of bosses from seeing their drunken nights out while banning former partners from seeing changes in relationship status. 

Other interesting changes to the settings include allowing friends of friends to see a user’s profile regardless of their network, expanding accessible networks of contacts innumerably.

I love these new changes since they allow me to worry less about what I am posting on my profile, with sensitive information being ‘protected’ from those who I would prefer not see it. Setting up ‘Limited Profiles’ before this upgrade was very time consuming and applied a standardised blanket of secrecy across all affected contacts; not personalised at all and extremely obvious to those you are hiding away information from! Check the new changes out in the Friends and Privacy sections of your Facebook account.

Facebook has also announced a new way to engage with friends on its network. Facebook Chat, an instant messaging client, will be released ‘within weeks’ and will use the user’s Facebook friends as contacts, tying the ‘chat’ function into the platform in much the same way as ’send message’ is for example. Requiring no downloads, the service will be within everyone’s reach as soon as it’s released and could very well become one of the most popular instant messaging services in the world. Recent reports suggest that Facebook Chat will function in a similar way to GTalk, sitting in a UI at the bottom of the browser screen. It can also, like GTalk, be popped out into a seperate window.

This new IM feature will give users a fully interactive social experience from their Facebook account, allowing people to communicate through conversations rather than through rather rigid wall posts and messages.

We are yet to see fully how this service will work, but, hopefully, in the next couple of weeks it will be released to the general public and we’ll find out first hand.