Facebook Reoptimizes Friends Page for Growth, Friend List Creation
Facebook today is rolling out updates to its Friends page that makes importing your webmail contacts and creating friend lists for filtering your home page feed easier. It’s a much needed brushup to the Friends page.
Facebook is putting contact list importing and friend suggestions up front to further encourage the site’s growth. Although Facebook is still adding over half a million new users per day, finding ways to increase the site’s viral growth is still a high priority. With the latest home page redesign, Facebook put its contact list importer upsell on the bottom of the right column, so increasing its priority on the Friends tab will help make sure it’s not missed.
In addition, Facebook has tweaked the Friend List creation flow on the Friends tab so that it’s now easier to make Friend List. Friend Lists are private groupings of your Facebook friends, which you can then use to filter the home page stream and make privacy settings for different groups of friends. Because Friend Lists are relatively hard to make, Facebook is trying to help make it easier. The more Friend Lists people have, the more usable the home page stream becomes.
Check out this video demoing from Facebook the changes:
May 1st, 2009 at 2:35 am
I have noticed it has also created some automatic friend lists based on my details (common workplace, common interests etc.)
May 1st, 2009 at 5:09 am
Sorry fb, hardly anybody has time for such things. Ping me if 1% people use this feature.
May 1st, 2009 at 7:50 am
But how do I see the friend details: like how I met them?
May 1st, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Recycling my comments from a similar story:
There is one key thing that used to be available on the Friends page that is no longer available.
After the “News Feed” re-design — which was a good idea overall — there is no longer a filter to see only status updates. I figured they would have added one by now, but they haven’t.
On the Friends page, however, you could cheat and still see status updates only. Now, no longer possible…. Read More
I am a big fan of Facebook, but IMHO, they need to realize that the News Feed needs ORTHOGONAL filters.
* One set of filters for WHO — Friend lists and networks.
* One set of filters for WHAT — Status updates, links, photos, videos, notes, applications.
I.e. what if I want to see “photos posted by family members”? “links posted by high school friends”?
It wouldn’t be a big change; just re-add the tabs at the top of the friend feed…
May 1st, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Who exactly needed this ‘brushup’? I really cannot understand this obsession with ‘organizing’ my friends into list. To me this is just one more unnecessary step in the current downgrade, pardon, ‘redesign’, of facebook.
May 1st, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I agree with Jim. This change is simply an annoying advertisement and little more. The Friends status update page was mine and many people’s favorite Facebook feature, and this useless change simply seems to be something that will drive the rest of us who haven’t yet migrated to Twitter to do so.
Without sufficiently useful ways to control the News Feed, that page has become very unwieldy.
I don’t understand why Facebook insists on forcing all these changes on everyone. Would it be so hard to create modular templates we could design for our own personal tastes?
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:56 am
sorry FB, but this was an EPIC FAIL
i don’t want to organize my friends into lists. take a cue from sites like google who have been around for a while and remain extremely successful..keep it simple and don’t constantly change things on your users
i don’t want ads shoved in my face every time i log on
May 3rd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I have to say I also HATE this new change….when I click on All Friends – thats what I want to see – not an advertisement site, not to mention not seeing my friends status up-date…why does Facebook continue to fix things that are not broken??????????????
May 3rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
This is ridiculous. If I click on the phrase “All Friends” it’s because I want to see my friend list, along with their status updates, etc. How useless to go straight to page that has nothing to do with my friend list. This doesn’t even make sense. I’m checking out twitter tonight.
May 3rd, 2009 at 9:41 pm
I have been stewing over this the past couple days. I loved being able to look at the status of all my friends. That is what led me to their profile pages. I am angry! Facebook, WHY would you do this? WHY?!!
May 3rd, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Suggestion: Instead of making changes to Facebook that are CRAP, try putting a suggestions link on the home page and letting Facebook users suggest things that actually need to be fixed!
May 4th, 2009 at 11:08 am
I have to agree with most of the commenters…the new friends page is terrible!! I don’t have time nor do I want to spend what time I have separating my friends into lists. I liked be able to quickly check status updates & recently updated without much effort. The friends tab is now completely useless to me.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:04 am
Add me to the list of frustrated users. While I find the new Friends page annoying — my default action is *not* to add new friends; I’ve already added most of the folks I know at this point. But what really angers me, is the same thing others have reported. There is now no way to see the status updates of all my friends. This was my #1 most used feature, and why I checked into Facebook at least once a day (often every few hours).
I couldn’t agree more with Jim Burnell’s comments (May 1st), and his suggestions. I hope Facebook address this issue soon.
BTW, in a totally unscientific analysis, I’ve noticed that since the change, my friends(90+) have been much less active. My feed has slowed to only a page or less a day of new material; prior, it was two or more pages a day.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:55 am
OMG!!! I HATE this new & UNIMPROVED friends site on Facebook!! If I want to find anymore friends I will search for them as I have the others. I enjoy reading my friends status updates! CHANGE IT BACK!!!!
May 5th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
This change is terrible. There are not many people who have time or care to create friends list and all that nonsense. When I click “Friends” at the top of the page I want to go to my Friends List!!! Change it back!! Now!!
May 5th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
How many more negative comments need to be made before the “friends” page get’s changed back? This is REALLY frustrating!!!!!!! Please Please Please change it back!!!!!!!!!!! If you are looking for ways to get more people using Facebook, this is not the way. If the current users are getting frustrated, why would new people join?
May 6th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Some changes are good, some are bad, the change to the friends status updates is VERY BAD.
I liked using the friends tab be able to quickly check status updates of my friends. This is one of the key features for me using facebook. I do not have the time to go to each page. The friends tab is now completely useless to me.
May 6th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Changes are supposed to make things better, all the comments in this page are negative , do something it is so obvious that the new friends page is a BAD BAD BAD change…
May 6th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
This change to the friend list has made it unusable. They took the most used feature and made it worthless.
This seems to prove that the people who work at Facebook DO NOT USE FACEBOOK.
There is no other way to explain such an idiot change to a product. Thank god they don’t make cars. They’d have removed the wheels.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:45 am
[...] week, Facebook reoptimized the Friends page for contact list importing and and friend list creation – two features vital to Facebook’s future growth and usability. However, at the same time, [...]
July 2nd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
It has been several months since the facebook changes to the friends page, and I am still unhappy. If I click on the phrase “All Friends” it’s because I want to see my friend list, along with their status updates, etc. I already knew how to make friends… I loved being able to look at the status of all my friends. That is what led me to their profile pages. The status update feature added the second week of May doesn’t fix it for me. I want to see only the last status posted, and I liked it alphabetized. I also used the friend’s detail feature. Now I go to fb once a week instead of twice a day….Please consider bringing back the great features of the older friends page….
July 5th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I thought I was the only one in America who was frustrated with not being able to quickly see status updates of all my friends. Obviously I am not alone. Anyone know of plans to bring that feature back??
July 15th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Greed ruins everything eventually :)
Hopefully this tiny “upgrade” won’t portend the beginning of the end for facebook. Unfortunately, it appears that a potential to increase membership trumps current customer satisfation and desires.
For one this page is poor user design — if we want to *add* friends we should do that from a menu item that says *add* friends — it is not our default most used action with friends, sorry facebook. Secondly, this page takes forever to load, so everytime I click on friends just hoping to, say, send a note to someone, I have to sit there and wait for this ridiulous page to load and then remember that it’s not even the page I want, you know, the page with my FRIENDS on it!?!
September 7th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Can a individual friend list have a separate set of privacy settings?
February 15th, 2010 at 1:05 am
I cannot stand this new version of FaceBook. I like the last one better. At the top of that page you gave All recent friends added, ALL friends and two other choices. I could easily delte someone who posts questionable pictures. Now I do not know where to go and delete them.
Signed a very frustrated FaceBook user.
Joe McGlinchey
May 18th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
I have a friend I have known for almost 7 years and I don’t know why he won’t add me to his list of friends on Facebook, I have request for his friendship more then twice now and I see his list gets new friends, but he won’t add me.
:(
May 19th, 2010 at 2:36 am
I have a friend I have known for almost 7 years and I don’t know why he won’t add me to his list of friends on Facebook, I have request for his friendship more then twice now and I see his list gets new friends, but he won’t add me.
November 21st, 2010 at 10:51 am
i look for girlfriend
can you help me?