Facebook (News - Alert) has often encountered problems when it comes to users sharing certain pieces of information with certain people. I don’t mean the long-reported security flaws or the selling of information without getting explicit consent from its users. I’m talking about how you might want to share a picture of you and your significant other with some friends, without your ex being able to stalk you.

Well, Facebook has been making a few tweaks to its service and one of them is an ability to sort friends into “smart lists.”

The last couple of weeks have actually been fairly busy for the social media giant in making changes to the site that will make their customers happier in the long run. We’ve already seen the ability to quickly and easily translate a Facebook page with the push of a button. And, one of the newest features that the social media site will be rolling out is the ability to get a summary of account notices as opposed to several e-mails all alerting you to different interactions.

The ability to use the “smart lists” is fairly apparent when it comes to separating your friends. Of course, the site has allowed users to separate friends on their own for years now, but that particular feature hasn’t been used all that often. The smart list feature, set to go live tomorrow, Sept. 14, will actually do it for you. This new feature will automatically sort your friends depending on location, where you went to school, or if you work together at the same company. You can also set the parameters of these lists to your own liking, without having to do that extra work of hand-picking every friend in the list.

Say you want to share the big catfish you caught this weekend. Obviously there is going to be a group of your friends who doesn’t have a huge interest in that. If you set the smart list to make a grouping of your friends who list “fishing” as a hobby, you can then only share the catfish photos with them. This will also come handy when you want to share your party photos with your frat brothers, but don’t want your parents seeing all the dirty deeds. 

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