How to Rediscover the Joy of Facebook

I've decided to start a new post category called "Tips" for sharing helpful bits of info I've collected, mostly about using the web. Enjoy!

Last year I nearly deleted my Facebook account, primarily because it had grown so cluttered with updates and requests from people I barely knew. As I recently mentioned in regards to Twitter, the signal-to-noise ratio had become unbearable.

As a last ditch effort, I decided to use Facebook's friends list feature to create a private list of my closest friends. It took forever to wade through all my Facebook friends and pick the 25 or so people I know the best, but the payoff was huge. Now when I load up my Facebook homepage, I only see updates from people who are close to me. As a result, Facebook has once again become a source of entertainment, community, and fun in my life, instead of a chore.

Of course I could have unfriended everyone but my closest friends, but this surely would resulted in hurt feelings. Because Facebook friends lists are private, I can avoid that. I also could have used Facebook's "hide" button in my news feed, but you are limited to hiding 200 people with this feature and it would have taken forever to hide everyone.

I highly recommend you try out a "close friends" list. Here are some good instructions on how to do it. Some extra tips I would add:

1. You can set the "friends" box on your profile page to only include people from one of your friends lists. Just click on the little pencil in the top-right corner of the box. This serves as a neat way to make a "top friends" box, like MySpace's old "Top 8."

2. On your Facebook homepage, after you click "more" on the left menu, you can drag your friends list to the top of the menu. If you do this, your friends list will come up by default on your homepage, saving you a click!

3. You can set privacy settings based on your friends lists. So if you'd like, you can give your closest friends access to info that the rest of your Facebook friends can't view.