Quick Tip: Taming Facebook Overload

If you've been swept up in the Facebook Geneablogger revolution, you've probably come to realize that Facebook, while a great tool for us all, can add to an already overwhelming amount of online data overload.

Today I just wanted to share a quick way to organize your Facebook contacts, so that you can head over to Facebook with goals in mind, and not always be sucked into the pleasurable social morass that Facebook so excels in.

An Organizational Tool

Among my many friends on Facebook, I have a number of different "groups" of friends... friends from my hometown, friends from college, work acquaintances and also the Geneabloggers.

If I head to Facebook with the express intent of, say, seeing what my Geneablogger friends are up to, I can streamline the process by organizing my friends into Lists.

Creating Lists

Creating lists and assigning friends to those lists is simple. To start, begin by clicking "Friends" in your navigational bar on your landing page:



Once on the friends page, click on the "Make a New List" button, and you will be prompted to enter a group name:



Once in the editing section for this newly named group, to make life easier, choose the "Select Multiple Friends" link in the upper-right hand side:



To add friends to this list, simply click on their photo as below:



Now, when visiting Facebook, you can filter your friends to view things like Status Updates, Profile Updates, etc. for only the group you are most immediately interested in reading about. For instance, here I have visited my Geneabloggers group, and selected "Recently Updated":



Voila'. An easy way to catch up on my Facebook friends, without being confronted by the status updates, links, and activities of all 73 friends at once. Lists trim the chatter to a manageable way to keep up to date while still staying sane.

Enjoy.