For a long time now, Facebook has offered users a way of sharing
content selectively. You can construct lists of your friends, to
divide them up into friends, colleagues, and acquaintances for
example, allowing the possibility to share personal information
only with your family.
But it was always clunky and took a lot of time to sort users
into the correct lists, very few people ever actually used it,
preferring instead to just trim their friends. Not any more.
Facebook has just launched an improved system called smart
lists, helping to automate the process of grouping your friends
together, but Google is not happy. Google launched their Google+ social
network in June and one of the key features of the network was
called 'circles' – easy to define social circles
that allow you to group your contacts by how you know them.
