Facebook Introduces “Subscribe” Button and Smart Lists

Facebook made some pretty significant privacy changes last month, which included introducing tag approval and better controls over how information is shared with specific groups. This month, the social network is revealing more tools to help users automatically categorize their friends, control who views the content they post, and allow users to decide whose status updates and photos they see the most and least.

Subscribe Button to fine-tune your News Feed

Facebook has introduced a new option in form of a button alongside the “Message” and “Poke” on a user’s profile, and on each post that shows up in your news feed that lets people “subscribe” to your profile.

Whenever you post an update on Facebook with its privacy set to “public,” it will appear in the news stream of your subscribers. The way liking a Facebook page works.

Subscriptions also let you subscribe to people you’re not friends with on Facebook, meaning that person’s public posts will show up in your news feed. The feature is a nice way of fine-tuning your news feed as it allows you to get more specific about what you see from whom. For example, you can choose to see only pictures from certain people, or everything except the apps they install.

The Subscribe feature is optional - you can choose to turn off the Subscribe button on your profile if you don’t want to gain any subscribers.

Smart Lists to categorize friends

Friend lists, or the ability to group people by how you know them (college, work, family), and only share certain information with certain groups has already existed on Facebook. But organizing these friends into lists is a time consuming task and requires a lot of manual work, and to overcome this inconvenience, Facebook on Tuesday introduced a new feature called Smart Lists which will automatically group your Facebook friends into different categories: family, city, high school, college and work.

So for an example, all your friends who listed that they work at the same workplace as you do, will automatically be added to your work friends group. Henceforth, you can decide whether to share a certain update with a particular list.

Smart Lists are entirely customizable after Facebook has set them up for you. You can even turn Smart Lists off altogether if you want to. You can manually add or remove a person from a list and even specify what age group of your school’s graduates from your friend lists you want in the list.

You can also choose to show only certain activities from specific list(s) of people in your News Feed. Also you can click on a list’s name in the left rail to view the News Feed of only that particular list. Note that Facebook does not tell people that they’ve been added to a list.