Facebook has launched a ‘smart lists’ tool that automatically sorts friends into categories and prioritise news from favoured members.
Launching this week, Smart Lists offers similar features to Google+ and its “circles” that mirror real-world social groups such as family, friends, and co-workers.
Smart Lists will generate groups of friends for Facebook users based on common attributes in their profiles such as a family, city, school or employer.
New smart lists are created and updated based on information people consent to share with friends on Facebook.
The optional feature eliminates the need to create lists from scratch, and also lets members be manually added or deleted.
Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook, said: “You have all sorts of different shades of gray in terms of how you interact with people. We wanted to make sure the product had a richer set of tools to allow people to control that experience.”
Facebook is adding functions to keep users on the site amid competition for Web surfers’ attention from rivals including Google+, which had about 29 million users at the end of July, according to ComScore Inc.
Google+ debuted in June to take on Facebook with streamlined sharing options linked to circles of friends most likely to want an image or message, such as family or fans of a certain sports team.
