A lot of debate has been stirring these past few days about Facebook’s redesign. One commenter from Livingston Communications’ The Buzz Bin article, Twitter in the Crosshairs, called it “the Twitterfication of Facebook”. This translation expresses the most voiced complaint I’ve seen. Our Facebook home pages have been transformed to a sea of real-time updates from our friends.

The problem with this is that you can lose sight of your  friends who don’t update frequently. Those that do will reign your home page real estate. Nothing wrong with that, but if your goal is to network with friends that are not that active, you have to dig deeper to find their updates.

Facebook has provided a solution for this, even before they delivered the redesign. They’ve given us the opportunity to assign our friends into categories of lists. I guess it was my 12 years as a list broker that enabled me to immediately embrace the value in this! Categories I’ve created for my friends include: family, personal friends, clients,  Inner Architect Facebook Page fans, former classmates, colleagues and networking contacts. These lists appear on my left side bar, and I can click on any list to just view the feed for that group.

I started this process when my number of friends was in the 20’s. I’ve kept it up by assigning new friends as they come in. Okay, this solution requires a bit of manual labor, but the investment is worth it to me. Who knows? There might even be an application out there that does the same thing. If anyone knows of one, please enlighten me.