Facebook Smart Lists Tool Silences News Feed Noise

Back in September Facebook deployed Smart Lists, a feature that automatically groups your friends into lists such as work, school, family, city and acquaintances.

Smart Lists, an optional feature, was a redesign of something Facebook had for years: Lists. The original Lists were difficult to navigate and tedious to update, which was one reason for the revamp.

Six months later, the Smart Lists feature is getting another tweak: A new tool lets you see more of what matters, such as posts in your News Feed from your close friends by adding friends you don’t know as well to your acquaintances list.

Adding a friend to your acquaintance list means their posts will show up less frequently in your News Feed. You can also choose to share updates, photos and more with “Friends Except Acquaintances.” And don’t worry—those you put in your acquaintances list won’t be told they’re included in it.

To begin, log into your Facebook account and visit facebook.com/friends/organize. You can also visit your Friends page, select the “Acquaintances” list and click “See All Suggestions.” Facebook will then generate a list of friends you interact with infrequently.

If there are friends included in this list that you want to remove, click their icon to uncheck the box, then click “Add To Acquaintances” at the bottom of the page.

Depending on the lists you’ve set up in the past, Facebook may take you through your other lists to weed out contacts you havent interacted with in a while. These could include friends from high school or college as well as coworkers. Continue clicking through until you’ve made it through your other lists.

Later, if you want to remove friends from your acquaintance list, visit your Friends page, found in the left-side column, and select “More.” Then, click on the name of the list you want to edit, click “Manage List” in the top-right corner and choose “Add/Remove Friends.” Select the friends you want to remove from this list, then click “Done” to save your changes.

[For more tips, tricks and details on Facebook, check out CIO.com’s Facebook Bible.]

Kristin Burnham covers consumer technology, social networking and enterprise collaboration for CIO.com. Follow Kristin on Twitter @kmburnham. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Kristin at kburnham@cio.com