Facebook Unveils 'Smart List', a Road to Facebook+?

This is Facebook+? one user commented on Facebook's Smart Lists rolled out on Tuesday.

Evidently, in an attempt to beat Google+ Circles and stay on top of everything in the social network market, Facebook debuted Smart Lists - an improved friend lists with which users can customize their lists of friends, define privacy settings and filter the news feed.

With the Smart Lists, users can target specific groups of people to share their information. The default lists include work, school, family and city. While a smart list would automatically pick up friends who went to the same school or work for the same company, users can manually add and subtract friends on the lists. Google+ has not yet developed the automatic listing functionality.

Users don't really want to spend a lot of time creating and maintaining friend lists, Naomi Gleit, the director of product at Facebook who worked on the feature, told the Associated Press.

By grouping together people who share the same experience, Facebook stays ahead of Google+ in providing users with easier content sharing.

To make your lists even more accurate, Facebook offers Close Friends and Acquaintances lists would be generated manually, showing their posts and photos at different frequency. For those in your Close Friends list, you can see everything they post in News Feed, and receive notifications of their updates. From Acquaintances, you will receive only important things among their post so you can at least keep in touch with them without being bothered by their daily issues.

In case you want to befriend but don't want to share specific information with some people, like your boss, Facebook lets you add them to Restricted list so they can only see your Public posts.

After much struggle with privacy issues, Facebook is evidently trying to adapt to the advent of Google+, first by introducing video-calling, upgrading its gaming platform immediately after Google introduced games in Google+, and now by emulating its most distinctive feature: Circles.

Currently, Google+ have gained 30 million users worldwide, while Facebook keeps its social network throne with 750 million users.