The Facebook Blog
Since we launched Facebook Chat, many of you have asked for ways to organize your connections and to control which friends see you online. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. You can now do that by using Friend Lists to filter your connections in Chat.
Friend Lists let you group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings.
From the bottom right corner of your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you'd like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.
Creating Lists
To create a new list, simply select the "Friend Lists" menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the "Friend Lists" menu. If you don't want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you'll then see your friends listed alphabetically.
Friend Lists let you group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings.
From the bottom right corner of your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you'd like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.
Creating Lists
To create a new list, simply select the "Friend Lists" menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the "Friend Lists" menu. If you don't want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you'll then see your friends listed alphabetically.
If some of your friends aren't in a Friend List yet, they'll be included under "Other Friends."
Going Offline
Alongside each list, you'll notice a green switch; when you turn off the switch, you'll be logging off of Chat for that list. Friends in lists that are switched off will not be able to see that you are online or chat with you, nor will you be able to see whether they are online.
Friend Lists are useful in organizing and filtering your experience on Facebook, especially as you have more friends from different parts of your life. To learn about other ways to use them on the site, watch this recent video tutorial.
Rob, a designer at Facebook, will see you online...or maybe not.
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