Facebook Smart Lists Borrow Google+ Circles

Facebook has announced that it will be making changes soon to the way users are allowed to organize and view their friends by automatically creating lists of the people on the user's friends lists. The changes will apparently roll out this week and is the latest attempt by Facebook to combat the growing threat by Google+ and other social networks. The smart lists will automatically organize your friends list by affiliation.

The smart lists will start organizing friends by affiliations with categories for work, school, family, and city. The users of Facebook will be able to populate the lists of close friends, acquaintances, and a restricted list for folks they don't want to know all their details. That restricted list would be nice if you have a boss or parent on your friends list that you don't want to see all your posts.

The smart lists appear to be the next evolution of the Groups feature that lots of people take advantage of on Facebook. The cool thing about the new smart lists is that you will be able to share a funny story about your kids for instance with family alone without letting your co-workers or acquaintances see it. The lists work by reading the tags that your friends list in their profiles. This is how the smart lists would populate coworkers, school mates, and families automatically.

[via SFgate]