The Facebook Blog

This week something great happened: two of my former students connected with me on Facebook. Three years ago, I taught writing at a small college in New Hampshire, and the new friend requests reminded me of how great it is to see what your former students are up to years later, as well as how difficult it can be to be a teacher.

Teachers work with an audience that is by definition impressionable. This means that being a teacher comes with the added responsibility of also being a public figure. As with most jobs, the extra-curricular life of a... teacher has professional consequences, which is especially important on Facebook where people are more connected and sharing more often.

Some teachers stay away from Facebook altogether, while others — like some of my friends — have found creative workarounds such as only accepting friend requests from students who've graduated or those who are over the age of 18. However, it doesn't have to be that difficult. In fact, it is useful and rewarding to connect with your students on Facebook. So, in honor of all the people who are heading back to school this month, here are some tips for using Facebook.

Create Friend Lists
You can sort your friends into lists, without them even knowing it. For instance, if you're a teacher, you can create a Friend List called "students" and adjust your privacy settings to control what people in that list see. You then could allow students to see basic information about you and maybe your photo albums from a recent trip you took, but not photos in which you've been tagged.

You can create a named list to organize your relationships in whichever way works best for you: close friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, students, among others. Just select the "Create a List" link on the left-hand side of the home page or create a new list from your Friends Page. Each time you receive a friend request, you'll have the option to add that person to the appropriate list as you accept them.

By using the Friend Lists you've created, you also can filter your home page to get updates from the people you're interested in. If you're a teacher, you can see what your students are sharing on the site by filtering for that group from the left-hand side of the page. If one group is most important to you, you can even set it as the default view for your home page by dragging it to the top of the left hand bar.

Check Your Privacy Settings
Don't be afraid to severely restrict what certain people can see. For instance, if you're a teacher, you may not invite a student to a dinner party with friends, and the same goes for your boss or other people you don't interact with in those types of social settings. You should use your Facebook privacy settings to reflect the types of relationships you have.

Once you've created your Friend Lists, you can use them to customize privacy levels for different information and content you include on your Profile. Select the "Settings" link located on the top menu bar and navigate to the Profile section of your Privacy page. From there, you can select "Edit Custom Settings," which will open a field for "Except These People." Adding a friend or Friend List here will exclude those people from seeing the information in question about you.

For example, maybe you want your close friends to see your favorite activities and your contact information so they can reach you easily, but you don't want your students to see those sections of your profile. You can exclude your "students" list from seeing the "Personal Information" and specific "Contact Information" sections of your profile.



We hope these suggestions can not only help students and teachers connect, but help all of you share with even more people in your lives.


Jesse, a training and communications lead, is a teacher here at Facebook.

Since we launched Facebook Chat, many of you have asked for ways to organize your connections and to control which friends see you online. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. You can now do that by using Friend Lists to filter your connections in Chat.

Friend Lists let you group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings.

From the bottom right corner of... your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you'd like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.

Creating Lists
To create a new list, simply select the "Friend Lists" menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the "Friend Lists" menu. If you don't want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you'll then see your friends listed alphabetically.



If some of your friends aren't in a Friend List yet, they'll be included under "Other Friends."

Going Offline
Alongside each list, you'll notice a green switch; when you turn off the switch, you'll be logging off of Chat for that list. Friends in lists that are switched off will not be able to see that you are online or chat with you, nor will you be able to see whether they are online.



Friend Lists are useful in organizing and filtering your experience on Facebook, especially as you have more friends from different parts of your life. To learn about other ways to use them on the site, watch this recent video tutorial.


Rob, a designer at Facebook, will see you online...or maybe not.

We launched a new Friends Page today to make it easier for you to find and organize your connections so you can better filter the content you see from them on your home page and manage your privacy settings. If you don't see the new page just yet, don't worry. We've started to roll it out today, and it will be available to everyone soon.

When you visit the Friends Page, you will first see tools that make it simple for you to find and connect with all the people you care about. The easiest way to find friends on Facebook is searching your email... address book. Just enter your information, and you'll be able to find all the people you connect with via email on Facebook, too. Check out suggestions of people or celebrities and organizations you may want to connect with or find friends by searching their name, email address or instant messenger accounts.

Grouping People

Now that you've found people you want to connect with, you can also create, view and organize those connections into Friend Lists right from the Friends Page. Friend Lists let you create named lists of friends to group relationships and more easily share with certain sets of people. We launched Friends Lists at the end of 2007 and have continued to improve them. We expect these lists to become increasingly useful throughout the site as it grows and evolves.



When you look at your new Friends Page, you may find a few lists already created for you. These are automatically recommended lists based on details you entered when you added a new friend and answered the question "How do you know this person?" You can modify or delete those lists if you choose.

Keep in mind, your friends won't be able to see any of the lists you've created.

Filtering Content

Once you've created your Friend Lists, you can use them all over the site — for example, to send Inbox messages, group or event invitations, or to set privacy on the content you publish. Now with the new home page, you can even filter the stream of stories on your home page by Friends Lists. That way, you can see what is going on with certain groups of people.



For a more detailed look at your new Friends Page, check out this video on how to get started.




Alexandre, a designer at Facebook, is keeping his friends close and his enemies on separate friend lists.


Tip: On the home page, you'll see all of your Friend Lists on the left hand side of the page. You can arrange the lists in any order. The first Friend List will become the default view for your News Feed — automatically filtering your stream to show all the updates from the people in that list each time you visit the site.