Facebook has essentially abandoned friend-list management in favor of its “groups” product. As of now, the “lists” of friends you spent hours creating are meaningless.
Despite its clean, uniform appearance for users, there seems to be a constant tweaking of the way Facebook works - features only some people will ever notice, but that make a great deal of difference to those who use them.
Facebook has recently made two changes to the way “Events” work that make it much more difficult for musicians and others who regularly send invitations to friends or fans. And I think I understand the self-serving reason they made changes to these features:
- The ability to select multiple people within a list
- The ability to use your own lists
I regularly find myself either creating and sending invitations on Facebook or inviting people to events others have created. For a good while, Facebook kept adding features that made the cumbersome process a little easier.
Under the “edit friends” tab under “account,” they created the ability to group friends into different lists.
Having worked in two highly social careers - in state and national politics and music - my social network is predictably large. Prior to lists, I had to wade through hundreds of people to find the few I wanted to invite to a particular event.
Once introduced, I created lists such as, “austin music,” “austin politics,” “film industry,” New York,” etc. I populated those list with people I would want to invite to events in those categories; and they allow 1 person to be on multiple lists. That was helpful having some friends who have multiple interests or even home-cities.
Prior to this week, if I wanted to send an invite to friends, I would pull up the appropriate list in the “Invite Friends” window off the event page and select everyone on that list that I had already curated.
That is where the first change came about two weeks ago - before then, once in your list you could individually select invitees or select them all at once and de-select individuals if needed. The ability to select more than one person at a time has been removed.
So, if I have 300 in a particular list, I now have to go through the list and click 300 times.
The second change is even more frustrating, though. I spent hours cumulatively on creating lists of my friends. Now, those lists are not available in the “invite friends” window. In fact, I can find no utility in those lists anywhere on the site now; they still exist, but there is absolutely nothing you can currently do with them.
Instead of allowing you to use your own lists, they have two ways you can narrow lists of potential invitees. You can narrow your list to a group of people within a particular city, or you can select a “Facebook Group” to which you belong or have created.
What it appears Facebook is trying to do is to force anyone who wants to narrow their invitations to particular sets of people to form “Groups” of those people. That product, though, can be highly annoying with the default setting being that group-members - whether they added themselves or not - receive notification of every comment in the group. Additionally, it would be presumptuous for a musician to assume a fan wanted to be added to such a public group and potentially damage that artist’s relationship with that fan.
I hope that some of these changes are only temprary. They seem particulaly odd at a time when Google has come out with a product that - while I have not yet been able to use it - purports to allow exactly what Facebook has just taken away: The ability to select groups of people all at once.
Help us out, Facebook.
