Facebook "friends" grouping confirmed

's="" new""="" class="c-regularLink" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Facebook's "What's New" page says the feature is "in the works":

Sort out your friends.

We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.

When signs of such a feature first surfaced via Facebook's API, many, including myself (see my recent post 'LinkedIn vs Facebook (round two)'), quickly saw the implications friends grouping has for competitors such as LinkedIn, with its focus on professional networking, and privacy-oriented social networking sites like Multiply. Once the new feature is rolled out, the first thing most users will do is start to separate their "friends", grouped by purely social relationships, and ones of a more professional nature, leaving dedicated professional networks out in the cold.

Targeted advertising

As Muhammad  Saleem points out, it's not only users that will benefit from the new feature, but advertisers -- and therefore, Facebook's bottom line. If users organize their networks into distinct groups, then these groups can be specifically targeted by advertisers. All a natural progression of data mining users' social graphs in order to enable more efficient marketing.