With more than 500 million people now on Facebook, it's inevitable that you'll be friended by someone you know, but with whom you don'twant to share your online life. Once you've accepted them as a friend,how do you avoid them without the awkwardness of unfriending them?
Facebook has made it easy to hide other members' status updates. Place yourmouse over an update from, say, Charlie, and a light blue X appears tothe upper right corner of the update. Click the X, and Facebook willpresent you with three buttons from which to choose: Hide Charlie, Markas Spam and Cancel. If you click Hide Charlie, you'll never seeCharlie's updates again. (Click Spam and the message disappears and anotice gets sent to Facebook's servers and analyzed by spam filteringsoftware.)
But how do you keep Charlie from reading your updates? Skirting your way around someone you've accepted as a Facebook friend istrickier. When you write a status update of your own, look for thelock-shaped icon below and to the right of the text input box. Click onthe lock, and Facebook will pop up a menu. Click the bottom option,Customize. That will pop up a dialog box labeled Custom Privacy thatlets you filter who will see your update.
There are two ways to exclude people. The quick and easy way is to type their names into thebox labeled "Hide this from these people" at the bottom of the dialogbox. To hide all future updates from these folks, click the checkbox atthe very bottom that says "Make this my default setting." Then click thebig blue Save Setting button. From now on, evil Charlie won't get yourupdates.The more sophisticated solution is to replace this blacklistwith a list of people you do like. That way you can accept any number ofnew friends without having to accidentally share your updates withthem..
To do this, click on Friends in the left margin of Facebook's interface. You'll see a button at the top of the Friends pagelabeled "+ Create a List". Click that and use the dialog box that popsup to make a list of the friends you want to share with. Call it, say,True Friends.
Next time you post an update, follow the instructions above to bring up the Customize dialog box. But instead oftyping into the "Hide this" field, click the menu at the top labeled"Make this visible to these people." Select the option Specific People. Atext input box will appear. Type the name of your new list, TrueFriends, into this field. Click "Make this my default setting" and thenSave Setting. From now on, only your True Friends list will see yourupdates. Complicated and annoying, yes, but probably much less so thanit was going to high school with Charlie.
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