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How to create Facebook “Circles” (aka Lists)

I’m tired of bitching about Google+. I don’t want to care anymore.

Google Orkut has 100 million users and Google Buzz had 30 million within their first week, so I don’t expect Google+ to really go anywhere and I’m thankful for that. Facebook offers more control than any social media site I’ve been on over the last 15 years. It appears that everyone thinks Facebook doesn’t offer this control though, so I figured I’d try to help out some instead of just continuing to bitch.

How to create Facebook “Circles” (aka Lists)

Google+ users have been touting this revolutionary feature where you pick and choose who to send your posts to. Well, it’s not revolutionary and it’s nothing short of a gussied up standard feature on other web sites. Here’s how to create a Facebook “Circle”.

While logged in to Facebook, click “Friends” in the navigation bar on the left. Click “Manage Friend List”, followed by “+ Create a List”. You will see the following:

Look familiar? Welcome to your first “Circle”.

So, name your circle and pick out whoever is in it. You can either type their name or go through the pictures and click them. Click “Create List” and you’re done. My first list was named “Family, Limited” and included my neice and nephew. You’ll see why in just a minute.

Now you’re ready to post, but you don’t want your Work/Family/Girlfriend/God/whoever to see it, or maybe you want ONLY  [insert list here] to see it. There is a handy lock icon with a drop-down arrow underneath your status bar, as seen below.

Click that and choose “Custom”.

From there, you have a beautiful set of privacy options with the option of clicking “Make this my default setting”. You can click “Specific People…” under “Make this visible to” and enter in the list(s) that you want to see your status.

On the other hand, you can also add your list(s) into the “Hide this from” section. For me, my default settings are Show to “Friends Only” and hide from “Family, Limited”. This means you HAVE to be a direct friend to see my status, but if you are my neice or nephew, you won’t be seeing it. This applies to every status, photo, link, video or question that I post on Facebook.

Why is this better than Google+?

Google+ operates under the idea that everyone you add may not be a close friend that you want reading your status. This is a noble idea and I commend them for that, however, this doesn’t apply to everyone and this certainly excludes many.

Google+ does not offer you a way to change your default sharing options (that I can find, at least). By default, all status updates are sent to your “Friends” circle and for each and every status update you must go in and add in which other circles can view it. I have 6 lists on Twitter to separate out the people I follow. I can’t imagine if I had to click additional lists every time I tweeted. I take that back. Google+ defaults to the last group that you sent a status update to.

Last notes…

This is NOT more difficult to do compared to Google Circles. In fact, when you compare the amount of clicks for setting up a G+ Circle compared to an FB List, you are only saving 1 additional click by using Circles.

Also, I’ve heard people say that Google+ is better because they offer this feature as you add a friend. Well, guess what, so does Facebook:

Use your heads people. Privacy is and always will be a big issue on the internet. I prefer a site that gives me complete control over that privacy.