Google+ Circle Function Comes to Facebook

When Google+ first arrived on the scene and brought with it the ability to add your friends to different “circles” for various areas of your life, people were thrilled.  Facebook sorta said, “So what?  You have that functionality NOW in Facebook, and you aren’t using it!”  The difference at the time, though was that you could share your status updates with only specific circles in Google+.  In Facebook, you could select the people you wanted to share your status update with, but you could not select your groups.  That functionality has finally been added to Facebook.  Although, it’s still not as pretty and easy to do as it is in Google+.

The reason you didn’t know that you could do this in Facebook is that it’s somewhat clunky and hard to use.  But the functionality has actually been there for quite some time.  They just now improved it so you can share a status with a specific group of friends.

The functionality in Facebook is called Lists.  To create a new list click on “friends” on the left side of your Facebook screen.  Then click on “manage friends list” at the top right of the screen.  From here in nearly the same spot as the “manage friends list” there will be a new button that says “Create a List”.  When you click the button you will have a small window pop up where you can name your list and look through your friends to add them to the list.  Add them by simply clicking on their name.  It will highlight the friend and you can keep going down the list till you’ve found everyone you went to high school with.  When you are done adding everyone click “create list” and you have your “circle”.

In order to share a status update with just that specific group, type the status like you normally would in Facebook, then click the icon right next to “Post”.  It may say “Public” or “Friends”.  Select “custom” from the list, and click the drop down menu next to “These People:”.  Click “specific people” and then in the field below start typing the name of the list you just created.  For example I would type “high school” eventually my list will pop up and I can click on the list.  Click “save changes” and then you can post your link to your high school gym being remodeled to the only people who would really care about that anyway!