• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 13, 2011

Facebook's feature for making lists of different friends has been around for years. It never got much traction because it was too clunky and time-consuming to use. The social networking giant aims to change that with improvements to Friend Lists that include automatically created and updated "smart lists" of co-workers, family, classmates and people who live near you.

Think of it as something like Facebook's twist on iTunes' Genius feature for creating song lists based on your music collection. In addition, users can now also assign people according to lists of "Close friends," whose posts will appear more frequently in the news feed, and trigger notifications, or "Acquaintances," whose posts will appear less often.

The revamped Friend Lists feature will also now make suggestions for various lists. The whole idea is to help users more easily sort out among hundreds or more "friends" on Facebook with whom they want to share content with and see updates from. In this way, online connections more closely mirror offline ones.

The shift to a less monolithic system for exchanging information on the site comes in the wake of Google launching rival social networking service Google+, of which a defining feature is its "Circles" tool for segmenting people into different groups.

Last month, Facebook unveiled a set of privacy setting changes aimed at giving people more control over whom they share information with and provide access to their profile. The new feature for creating "smart" friend lists goes a step farther by automating what had been the tedious manual process of organizing lists according to different kinds of relationships.

The smart lists are populated based on information explicitly included in friends' profiles.

With the new algorithm-driven method, "if you list Boston College as a school you've attended and your friends John and Sarah do, too, then you would instantly have a smart list called 'Boston College' with John and Sarah on it," stated a Facebook blog post Tuesday. "This means that if you're having a grad party or a college reunion, you can easily share photos with just your college friends, without bothering other people you know."

Unlike smart lists, lists of close friends and acquaintances still have to be created manually, since determining these types of relationships is a matter of personal judgment, according to Facebook. While posts and photos uploaded by close friends will get prominent play in the news feed, only the most important updates by acquaintances -- like when they get married or move -- would show up in a user's stream.

Facebook has also added a "restricted" list for people who will only get to see a user's public posts. That's where your boss or others you don't necessarily want to share with might go. "You'll still be friends on Facebook so you can send them messages or tag them in a post if you want to connect to them from time to time," stated the post.

Taken together, the potential of the changes "to get users to publish content more often but to fewer people is important to the long-term health of Facebook and its ability to fend off competitors focused on micro-sharing such as Google+," noted Facebook-tracking blog Inside Facebook.

And by extension, the more relevant content users share and get, the better chance that advertising served alongside it will also be more relevant. Still, the blog points out that smart lists could raise new privacy issues for Facebook. Specifically, when someone receives a post in their feed because they're on a friend list, they can see who else is on that list.

Previously, members of friend lists have been private unless explicitly featured in a user's profile, "and being forced to reveal their members might make users wary of publishing to them," according to Inside Facebook. Blake Ross, the company's director of product, told the blog that Facebook may add more types of smart lists, but only ones based on explicitly provided profile data.