My friend’s reaction to the new Facebook redesign seems to be a refrain in the on-going chorus against the site’s changes: “It’s just too much information!” The new Facebook home page seems so cluttered with all of its Twitter-like, real-time updates—keeping you informed about your “Friends’” every photo comment, tag, link and other “recent activity” in chronological order. The little “Like” feature that popped up on the site is supposed to help us pay attention to the important stuff—but there’s just too much of it on one page. Oy! In an attempt to help users “life-cast” their online world, Facebook suddenly feels unintentionally … impersonal.

But there are ways to wield Facebook to your will. You can curate your new home page with filters and select your own content. See all those links and boxes on the far left column? It’s time to use them:

Friend Lists allow you to control the content you see and protect your privacy on Facebook. You can create a friends list that includes your coworkers and set privacy settings so they can’t see your photo albums or your status updates. Or you can create one especially for your happy-hour friends and send them notes when you find one with your favorite micro brew. 

Here’s Facebook’s instructions on how to create Friends lists:

To create a Friend List, click the “Friends” link at the top of any Facebook page. From the following page, click “Make a new list” on the left. After typing in the title of your list, you can add friends to your list by typing your friend’s name into the “Add to List” field. You can also click “Select Multiple Friends” to the right of the field, which will allow you to select many friends from your entire list. After making your selections, click “Save List” to store your changes.

Once you’ve created your friends lists, they will appear in the left column and you can click on what you’d like to see. The default “News Feed” view might be too much information for you at once. If you only want to see what your college buddies are up to, just click on the list you created for your fraternity brothers. If you want to see what your local politicians are up to on Facebook—make one for them and click on that link when you want to read what they have to say.

You can drag and drop friends list based on the order you want to see them as well.

X’d out:

If there are friends you want to hear less from (enough with the baby pictures, long-lost high-school acquaintance!), simply click the little “x” that appears when you mouse over a posting from them in your News Feed, and their stories will go away. If you change your mind, click on “See Hidden Friends” to see which of your friends and pages have been removed from your News Feed filter. Simply click “Add To News Feed” to bring them back (after they’ve returned from those jealousy-inducing updates about their vacation in Australia, of course).

Story types:

You can also filter your stream by application type. If you want to see more photo updates and fewer event details, drag and drop the applications based on what you’d like to see. If you only want to see which articles and Web sites your friends have been sharing and reading (Clay Shirky, anyone?) simply click on the “Links” application filter.  

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see your family’s recent photo postings by clicking on your family friends list and the “photos” application list on the home page? Well, you can’t do that … yet. Facebook’s new design certainly isn’t perfect and, with time, Mr. Zuckerberg’s team will probably roll out some tweaks. So if you want your voice to be heard, make sure to drop them a note.

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