Facebook thinks it’s soooo smart with these latest updates.

The change has been rolled out: Facebook has created new lists and new rules for you to manage all your friends.

From Facebook: “Smart lists automatically update themselves with coworkers, classmates, local friends and family members based on your friends’ profile info.”

Okay, that’s definitely “smart”–but is it my kind of smart? My friends are already organized into lists like these. Why do I need another collection of lists that Facebook thinks it should pre-populate?

Just how “smart” does Facebook think it is?

If you don’t already have lists or are overwhelmed by your News feed, then this could work out great for you.

I personally found it a drag.

Account > Edit Friends shows you the entire list of all your connections. You can see at a glance what list they belong to, but depending on how many friends you have, at-a-glance can go on for a long time.

Home > Lists (on the left side) is where you’ll be doing your maintenance. Hover over Lists and click “More” when it appears. Now you can see everything you’ve got, old and new.

New lists for me were Close Friends, Acquaintances, Family, my workplace, and my location.

One saving grace is although I was unable to remove these Facebook-generated lists, I don’t have to use them.

For example, I already have a Family list, so I don’t need to use Facebook’s Family list–but I did have the option to merge the two together, which I tried out. It worked fine. ETA: Adding new people to a Facebook-generated list makes you send them a message to update their profile. Bah.

You also don’t lose anybody in your existing lists.

It’s the Close Friends and Acquaintances lists that have got me bugged.

Close Friends: Your best friends, who should show up more in News Feed.
Acquaintances: Friends who should show up less in News Feed.

Sure, you might want less chatter from some and more from others, and seeing the same group of people over and over again may be exactly what you want (unless you load everyone into Close Friends).

I personally like variety and seeing what people I don’t talk to all the time are up to.  This is part of what I use Facebook for. I know tastes vary.

And there’s the other side of it: If I have a sticky situation that I need help with and I post my question to a restricted group like Close Friends, I might not get any answers at all. You never know who knows something!

And figuring out what Facebook considers “more” and “less” is not something I want to invest time in.

Here are a couple more changes:

Before this, the little Shared With icon on posts would just say “Becky’s friends” to others. Now friends see names and the number of people you shared with. Seems like a little dig into privacy.

We also get to check our subscriptions to our own friends. It’s automatically set at the Most Updates level. I am leery of the “Only Important” option, even though you can customize the types of updates after that.

Maybe I’m just disenchanted with Facebook being a smarty-pants, and disinclined to trust all their Google+ backlash updates.

What do you think? Don’t care about the changes, think they’re stupid, or are pouncing on them like a duck on a bug?