Simplifying friendlist management

Online social networks like Facebook allow users to connect, communicate, and share content. The popularity of these services has lead to an information overload for their users; the task of simply keeping track of different interactions has become daunting. To reduce this burden, sites like Facebook allows the user to group friends into specific lists, known as friendlists, aggregating the interactions and content from all friends in each friendlist. While this approach greatly reduces the burden on the user, it still forces the user to create and populate the friendlists themselves and, worse, makes the user responsible for maintaining the membership of their friendlists over time. We show that friendlists often have a strong correspondence to the structure of the social network, implying that friendlists may be automatically inferred by leveraging the social network structure. We present a demonstration of Friendlist Manager, a Facebook application that proposes friendlists to the user based on the structure of their local social network, allows the user to tweak the proposed friendlists, and then automatically creates the friendlists for the user.