This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Viewing and Editing Friends
After you start accumulating friends on Facebook, you’ll want to view their profiles from time to time and see what they’re up to online, or check out their latest photo or video postings. For starters, when you open your profile page, Facebook displays a random list of friends in a little Friends box area on the left side of the page. You can click a friend to view his or her profile. There are far more ways to view as well. The best place to begin is on the Friends page. The Friends page offers all kinds of ways to view, filter, and organize your friends on Facebook.
Viewing Friends
There are several routes you can take to the Friends page. You’ve already learned how to open the Friends page to the search options earlier in this lesson. Now you’ll learn how to view your friends list. You can click the Friends link on the Facebook navigation bar at the top of the page and then click All Friends. You can also hover the mouse pointer over the Friends link and click All Friends. In addition, you can also click the See All link found in the Friends box area on your profile page and then click All Friends. Any of these paths will take you to a page displaying your list of friends, similar to Figure 3.9.
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Figure 3.9 The friends list is simply a page or pages listing all your Facebook friends.
To view any friend’s profile in the list, just click the person’s name or photo. There are a couple of filters you can use on the left side to filter the list and show recently added friends, or friends who have updated their status. You can click the Browse link, for example, to browse friends based on their network.
If your friends have added phone information to their profiles, such as a cell phone number, you can click the Phonebook link and view their contact information.
Organizing Friends into Lists
If you like organization, you’ll love Facebook’s friend lists. You can group your friends into lists, which is particularly useful if you have hundreds of them on Facebook. For example, you may have a list for family and another for close friends, and still another list filled with casual acquaintances. Lists can help you keep track of different groups at different times, or send out messages to everyone in a group all at once.
If you’re like most people, you probably talk about some subjects with everybody and other subjects with only those who are close to you. For example, you may freely express your political or religious views, but not everyone on your friends list or network may want to share in those views. So you end up having private conversations with some, and more public conversations with others. You can make sure your separate worlds don’t collide on Facebook using friend lists as a tool for communicating and organizing.
To create a friend list, follow these steps:
- Navigate to the Friends page and click All Friends.
- Click the Create List button at the top of the lists area.
In the Create New List box (see Figure 3.10), type a name for the new list and press Enter or Return.
Figure 3.10 You can use the Create New List box to whip up a specialized list of Facebook friends.
- You can scroll through and click on people you want to add to the new list, or you can type their names in the field at the top of the box.
- When you finish adding friends to the list, click the Create List button.
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After you create a new list, Facebook saves it and displays the Home page showing only the status updates and news feed of the people on the list you just made. To return to the normal news feed again that shows all your friends, just click the News Feed link on the upper-left side of the Home page. Anytime you want to view the news feed with just the friends from the list you created, just click its name on the Home page. You can also click the list name from your Friends page.
You can easily add names to a list, or remove names. The list is just for you; no one else can see your lists. To edit your list, return to the Friends page and click the list. Click the Edit List button and make your changes. When you finish, click the Save List button.
To remove a list entirely, display the list and click the Delete List button; then click Delete List from the box that appears.
You can use Facebook’s emailing features to email everyone on a list all at once. To learn more about sending messages in Facebook, see Lesson 7, “Communicating Through Facebook.”
Un-Friending Friends
As your friends list grows, you may encounter an occasion in which you want to “un-friend” someone. For example, if the person turns out to be a notorious spammer or you have a falling out of some kind, you can remove the person from your list, or perhaps you want to pare down your list to just people you actually know in some way. There’s no official declaration of this action; however, if your friend goes looking for you in her friend list, your name won’t appear anymore.
To remove a friend, display his or her profile page and click the Remove from Friends link located near the bottom-left area of the page. You can also click the person’s name on your Friends page friends list (see Figure 3.9) and click the X button to the right of the person’s name. A prompt box appears, as shown in Figure 3.11. Click the Remove button to finalize the removal.
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Figure 3.11 A friend removal action is permanent.
There’s no undo button for a friend removal. If you do want to “re-friend” them again at a later time, you’ll have to beg them to be your friend again through a friend request.