Facebook encourages users to isolate friends on the Acquaintance List
As mentioned by Facebook engineer Jonathan Coens on the company’s newsroom, the social network has rolled out a new tool that provides suggestions in regards to friends that could be good candidates for the Acquaintance List. Launched with the Close Friends List during September 2011, the Acquaintance List is designed for friends that aren’t as interesting as they used to be. Extremely similar to the grouping feature on Google+, the user will see far fewer posts within the main news feed from friends that have been moved to the Acquaintance List. Facebook chooses friend relationships that haven’t been very active over the past few years and breaks these suggestions down into categories such as city, high school and college.
In order to access this new feature, go to the Friend’s List page and select Acquaintances. While the user can create Acquaintance specific wall posts within the main feed, friends can be added to the list on the right side of the page.
To see the suggestions manager, click “See All Suggestions” and follow the steps to move friends onto the Acquaintance List. In order to take someone off the Acquaintance List, simply revisit the main Friend’s List page and manually remove each friend.
Ideal for Facebook users that have 250 friends or more, this feature is ideal for removing the clutter from the main Facebook feed. Facebook will still show the user major milestones in the lives of friends on the Acquaintance List such as moving to a new city or relationship changes, but the vast majority of status updates, likes and comments will be removed from the main feed. As Facebook continues to push the importance of lists to users, it’s possible that the social network will insert a link to this tool within the sidebar of the main feed from time to time. Facebook could also add the Acquaintance List option to a drop-down menu when viewing a specific post within the main feed.
This article was originally posted on Digital Trends
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