Are Seven

Nutshell: Create groups of your own to segregate out who sees different parts of your Facebook profile.

One of the most common reasons given for not joining Facebook is feeling skittish about who gets to see your all-too-personal pictures and comments. Facebook knows that this is an issue and is even moving (I’m told) towards becoming a place where people can make more professional contacts. And you don’t really want those people seeing your pictures of you obviously drunk on the couch, holding two drinks towards the camera. Not that there’s any pictures of me like that on Facebook.

Anyway, the purportedly-good people at Facebook are constantly tweaking their privacy settings, and just this week pushed out a useful feature to control who sees what. So if, say, your boss or parents were on your friends list, you can now put them in a list that will limit what they see, while continuing to let the rest of your friends see all the sordid details.

To do this:

1. While logged into Facebook, click on the Friends tab.
2. At the top of the right column, you’ll see a blue button that says “Friend Lists”.
3. Click on “Make a New List” and call it whatever you want. I called mine “Limited” to create a group that I want to blanket-disallow certain things. As with any user group, try to plan as best you can. It makes life easier going forward.
4. In the top right corner, click the “Privacy” link
5. Click the “Profile” link in the body
6. For each part of Facebook that you want to exclude this list of your friends from, click the dropdown box and select “Customize”
7. At the bottom of that dialog box in the “Exclude these people”, enter in the name of your list. They will no longer see that category. I excluded that list from my photos, videos, and status updates.

(click for larger size)

Once you’ve set up the list, you only have to add other friends of yours to that list, and everything that has that list in the exclusion rule will be hidden from them.

Obviously, you can customize your lists however you want. I still think that Facebook could be going about this in an easier way, and maybe they will, but in the meantime, this is a simply fix to make sure that your professional Facebook contacts don’t see what’s only meant for the personal contacts.

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