I’m one of the 3% or so that doesn’t hate the new Facebook design update.  I agree that it feels a lot like twitter, but with one important feature improvement… organizing my friends into more easy to follow groups.  Even if you only have a few dozen friends, seeing those updates that are most important to you can be difficult when the full stream of updates is gushing… But with the new ability to organize friends into groups, I can now filter the noise into specific channels that are most important to me.

I’ve created a group from my old friends I grew up with in Hawaii, so I can see what’s going on with them back home from time to time.  I have a group for what I call my Thought Leaders (People I admire and look to for inspiration, advice, wisdom, etc.) that I check a couple times per day.  And I have several other groups that help me see what’s going on in my social circles.  Twitter unfortunately leaves me using the search or services like TweetGrid to try and keep track of things that are important to me.  So you may hate Facebook’s new design… but you can still find it more useful.

How To Organize Group Update Streams on Facebook

Step 1: Get On Your Homepage. Find the Rough Gem.

Sign in to facebook.com.  You’ll notice the new layout and under your name in the top left corner is where your groups (networks) are displayed… I believe by default, your location, work and Private Profiles or something like that are there.

Step 2: Manage / Create Your Friend Groups

Click Friends in the top navigation.  It will take you to a page that lists all your friends and groups (Networks / Lists) that you’ve created.  Below your list of of groups, there is a Make a New List button.  Click that to pop open a div to name your new group.

I’m going to name this group “From My Post” so I can organize all the wonderful people that find me on Facebook from this post.  Hit enter after you’ve typed the name you want in.

Step 3: Organize Your Social Circles

Now that you’ve created your group you can now add people to the list.  You can do this by either searching for individual friends by adding their names into the Add to List field… or Click Select Multiple Friends to open up a grid of all your friends to easily browse through and bulk add to your new group.

Step 4: Sort Your Groups. (Yes, you’re ranking your friends…)

Now that you’ve created all your groups and added your friends to each according group, you can go back to your main updates page and organize how those groups display. Click the More button below your last displayed group and the full list should drop down. (As shown below).  Drag and drop your groups to reorder them. *Drag groups above that divider line to make them display on your home page without needing to click the More button.

Step 5: Enjoy Easier to Digest Streams of Updates

Now all you have to do is login and you can see the full stream of all your friends updates or easily click one of your groups on the left to see a nicely trimmed stream of updates that are most important to you.

An Unfortunate Trade-off

One thing that does looks like it suffered at the expense of this update was the ability to really tune what you saw in the steam of updates… ie, photos are really important to me, but zombie-brain achievements not so much.  Maybe it’s still in there somewhere and I’m missing it, but it looks like now all I can do is hide people instead of just hiding some of their updates.

Ok, so now you can find me on Facebook and add me as a friend so I can get some interesting, charming and handsome new friends in my newly created group.