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Facebook quietly highlighting Starred Friends UI to help manage close friends list

Facebook quietly highlighting Starred Friends UI to help manage close friends list

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Facebook continues to try and push people into using its Smart Lists to manage privacy: a new "star your close friends" window is now popping up for some users of the site.

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Facebook continues to try and push people into using its Smart Lists to manage privacy: a new "star your close friends" window just popped up for us at the top of the News Feed, and has apparently been appearing for others over the past few weeks. While highlighting the functionality this way is somewhat new, it's really all just an additional UI for adding people to the existing Close Friends smart list, which prioritizes their updates in News Feed. (Your friends can't see if you've starred them or added them to any other lists.) It's a solid idea, but the suggestions are a bit strange: they appear to be a combination of the people you most frequently interact with and then a random assortment of other friends. (I haven't talked to some of the people it suggested in years.) Starring someone adds them to the group in the top right, and a new suggestion auto-populates in their place.

We're digging around to see if anything else has changed; let us know if you see this new element and how it's working for you in comments.

Update: Facebook confirms that it started rolling out the new feature last night for "some users," so it's not yet appearing for everyone.