One of the many recent changes that Facebook have made is the introduction of smart lists. On your Home Page you’ll seen Lists on the left hand side under Favourites. A number will have automatically been created for you such as Family and Close Friends as well as lists around your employment history, location and education.
This helps you filter updates you receive and publish thus making the Facebook experience more focussed with less noise. To view updates from a list just select it. Automatic addition of people to lists as they update their profiles and suggestion of who to add is what make the lists ‘smart’. You can add people to a List by selecting it and then searching (on right hand side) or by adding friends from List Suggestions.
You can also configure the criteria used to automatically add people to your lists – select Manage List after selecting your list or from your Lists page. Lists are very similar to Google+ Circles which operate in a similar way. However, there is no smart or automatic element with Circles but as Facebook and Google+ are going head to head in trying to outdo each other this is unlikely to remain the case for long. Incidently, Google+ is now open to the public. If you’ve signed up let us know what you think.