Get Better Privacy And Less Chat Annoyance With Facebook Lists

Reader Revolutions felt that too many Facebook users were missing out on the power of Lists. They’re not just for organising—they also provide instant anti-coworker shields, as well as salvation from annoying Facebook Chat pop-ups.

On Facebook Lists: This is a feature I’ve been using extensively recently, and I really don’t know why more people don’t utilise it. I’ll just highlight some ways to use it/to set it up.

So, what they are: Lists are basically easy ways to group your friends, so you can take specific actions for those groups. For example, you may simply want to post a status message that only one list of friends can see, and others cannot—or that one list cannot see. You see? [Not to be confused with the UCs, of course, with whom I have no affiliation at this point] .

Making them is a pretty simple process. Click “Account,” and go to Edit Friends. On the top right, click Make a List, and enter the name of your friends.

I’ve found many uses for them, but one of the more… useful (for lack of a better word) purposes is chat. You can appear offline to certain lists in chat—and it’s really simple. Once you’ve created a list of friends, when you go to chat, a little slider will appear next to the list name, which will allow you to be invisible to this group. I personally have made a list appropriately named “annoying”, where I keep all the contacts I’m tired of chatting with.

This is also helpful for photos and statuses. Say you don’t want your coworkers to read one of your statuses, and you can easily hide them by clicking the “lock” button on the bottom right when typing your status, clicking customise, and typing the name of a list into the “Hide from these people” field. You can do similarly with most of your privacy settings.

It’s made my Facebook experience much, much better. I can customise who sees what, and it just makes life simpler. After all, don’t all of us have those few friends who comment on all your statuses or chat you at the most inopportune times with useless messages? Defriending them is an option, but this way, they have no easy way of finding out.


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