How to Manage Facebook Friends Lists

By Carolyn Abram from Facebook For Dummies, 4th Edition

After finding and adding Facebook friends, you may find that things are getting out of control. The Facebook Friend List and Smart List are tools that help you end the madness. Friend Lists are subsets of your giant list of friends. Friend Lists are a way of organizing your friends into lists to make your Facebook experience even easier and more personalized to you and your types of friends. Organizing your friends into Friend Lists allows you to

Share different types of information with different sets of friends. For example, your best friends may get to see your party photos, and your family may get to see your wedding photos.
Communicate with the same groups of people. Friend Lists can be used in the Inbox. Say that you always invite the same group of people to go biking. Add them all to a Friend List, and then, each time you want to send an invitation, you can simply message the list rather than typing their names each time. To send a message to a Friend List, simply type the name of the list in the To line where you normally type a name.
Use Friend Lists in Chat. You can show yourself as online or offline to different groups of people, or easily scan for certain types of friends currently online, such as social friends if you’re looking for a dinner date, or carpool friends if you need a ride.

The options for how you create Friend Lists are virtually limitless. You can have 1,500 friends on each list, each friend can be on more than one list, and you can make up to 100 Friend Lists. Your lists can be for silly things (Girls' Night Out Girls), real-world needs (Family), or general bucketing (co-workers).

Smart Lists are the lists that Facebook makes on your behalf. These lists are created automatically based on your interactions with your friends, and shared characteristics of your friends. Some common Smart Lists are

Close Friends: Facebook creates this list based on things like people you interact with a lot on Facebook, people you appear in a lot of photos with, and so on.
Acquaintances: The opposite of the Close Friends list. This list is meant to be a place where you can cordon off the people you don’t know as well. They might be perfectly nice people, but they aren’t necessarily the people you want to share everything with. In fact, one of the default privacy options when you post something from the Share menu is Friends Except Acquaintances, which is Facebook’s way of saying, “Only share this with my real friends.”
Family: Based on information you have entered about your family, they may show up on this Smart List.
Your High School: If you’ve caught up with a lot of old friends on Facebook, a Smart List might be created so you can post photos from the reunion or share memories just with them.
Your college/university/workplace: Similar to a high school list, depending on the information your friends have listed on their profiles, additional Smart Lists may be created for these groups.