Facebook Adds Friend Lists to Facebook Chat
May 11th, 2009
| By Justin Smith | 12 Comments » |
Ever since Facebook launched Facebook Chat one year ago, grouping contacts inside the Facebook Chat window has been a top user request. This afternoon, Facebook just turned on grouping friends by Friend Lists in Facebook Chat – and also started allowing users to turn their visibility on and off per Friend List. Here’s how it looks:

After choosing which Friend Lists to show in the chat window, friends included in selected lists show up at the top of the list. Other friends remain in the chat window below selected Friend Lists in a group called “Other Friends.”
However, the most interesting new feature is the ability to turn your visibility on and off for individual friend lists. Say, for example, you want to be available to work friends during the day but not after certain hours, or vice versa – now you can. The “slider” next to each friend list name lets you make yourself visible or invisible to that particular friend list.

Originally used for privacy settings, the concept of Friend Lists is becoming much more thoroughly used throughout Facebook these days. With the launch of the new home page a few weeks ago, Facebook promoted Friend List creation to the home page. They can also be used to send Facebook Messages to entire groups of Facebook friends at a time.

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May 11th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
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May 11th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
IM needs to evolve, but definitely not in this direction. Whatever fb does, people wont create friend groups, they always got better job than that.
Instead fb should do invisible mode present in most IMs, and making able to make visible to only one friend at a time.
May 12th, 2009 at 5:54 am
[...] Vía | insidefacebook [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 7:49 am
[...] Vía | insidefacebook [...]
May 16th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
[...] longer periods of time, and Facebook has continued to enhance the service. Just last week, Facebook added Friend List support for Chat, letting users choose who they want to be visible to while online. Now, it appears [...]
May 16th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
[...] added Friend List support for Chat, letting users choose who they want to be visible to while online. Now, it appears Facebook may be preparing to add video chat soon as well. [...]
May 18th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I hate the new chat feature. You can’t alphabetize your friends or even turn off the group feature.
May 24th, 2009 at 6:52 am
hiii
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Turns out you can turn it off… took me awhile to figure it out. Basically just un-check/hide all the groups and the chat will go back to how it used to be… alphabetized and without groups.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:57 am
hi
July 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
hello
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:36 am
hellow would you be my friend