Facebook Friend Lists Could Be Hiding Something More serious

An article by Ayelet Noff    3 Comments

Facebook has been adding a whole lot of new features lately. Although they haven’t quite filled the cups of each kind of social profiler (ie: musicians, career seekers, etc) but they have certainly risen to the 3/4 mark, and are getting closer by the day. (Yes, I’m recording exact measurements).

Yeah, yeah, last week, Facebook uploaded a new fresh alerts system. But most recently and more importantly, they’ve now added the ability to group your friends by creating lists. This is possible, so far, via the Facebook chat window and also the ‘create’ link on your homepage. The chat window’s new prompter makes the listing option hard to miss. This new feature makes sense because, and I’m sure we’ve all begun to notice, it’s not just your buddies you’re ‘facing’ anymore, it’s your mamma, your pappa and all your work mates too. So now you can feel free to put your embarrassing family members in a group of their own and pretend like you’re offline to them.

Presumably the idea behind this moves beyond snubbing and keeping organized. These slight ‘grouping’ motions may in future threaten the idea behind “professional” social networks such as LinkedIn and Xing. These subtle differences bring up new questions and new options. Will Facebook soon allow you to change your profile and how it looks for different groups of people? Could you have one “family friendly” profile, one ‘professional’ work profile and one fun profile for your friends?

You can already do this manually on a friend-by-friend basis; it’s not too much of a stretch to think that you soon will be able to do customize your profile by group. And then LinkedIn, Xing and the rest will have a major problem.

Image credit: Laughing Squid