Facebook announced on their developers site that early 2010 would bring about a major change for applications to the popular social media site. All facebook applications will be excluded from pages, profile boxes, application info sections, and the Boxes tab leaving tabs as the only way to integrate. This means saying bye bye to annoying notifications from applications, posts on your profile wall from friends taking social quizzes, and that top friends box sitting on the left of Jane’s profile page. For many this will come as a relief; the popularity of facebook applications has grown so rapidly that it’s hard to weed out the trash and find the real information you’re looking for.

Of course, some applications you may have become very fond of such as the memorable web address or dogbook (yea, you know you love it – or at least some people do – they have 957,410 monthly active users). In order to keep those applications on your profile you’ll need to add a tab to your profile for that app. Memorable web address sent out a notification with a diagram on how to do this as well as a request to email you notifications from now on as all contact with users through facebook will be cut off.

What do you think of the new change to facebook applications?

Why create friend lists?

Facebook friend lists are a great way to define what information you share with different people.

…Because you might not want to broadcast that you’re not liking your boss today to all your co-workers via your status, or maybe because you’d rather not have your aunt Laura checking out your photos from last weekend’s happy hour. Whatever the case may be, we tend to share a lot of information on social networks and don’t always realize how much and with whom we share that info.

The Facebook friend list feature is a great way to separate friends and define what information particular lists are allowed to see. They help control your privacy and are quite easy to create too!

Making the List

1. Creating a friend list is actually very simple. Log in to your facebook account and click on “friends” from the main navigation. Above your friends will be 3 buttons…you got it, click on “create list”.
2. A box will appear that will prompt you for a name for the list, go ahead – name it! Work, family, Malibu Barbies…whatever your heart desires.
3. Select the friends you wish to add to the list and then click ok.
4. A link to your  new list will now appear under “Lists” in the left navigation.
5. When you add a new friend you can choose to add them to a list.

I’ve Got a List, Now What?

Now it’s time to define what information is available to the list. “On the Profile section of your Privacy Settings page, clicking “Edit Custom Settings” will open a field for “Except these people.” Adding a friend or Friend List name here will hide the information in question from these people when they view your profile” (Facebook.com). If you have someone added to multiple lists, Facebook will always use the list settings with the highest privacy.

If at any time you decide, say “Tom” if your friend again and you’d like to share your photos with him just go to the friends page, find “Tom” and on the right you’ll have the option of adding or removing him from lists. It’s just that simple.

Facebook has so many options that it can be hard to figure out how to do simple tasks; I hope this blog post has helped you define lists and privacy settings. Now go ahead – get started creating friend lists…if you have a couple hundred friends it might take awhile!