How To: Use Circle Hack to Organize Your Facebook Friend Lists à la Google+ Circles

There's a lot of talk going around about Google's new social network and how it's heavily influenced by Facebook, but truth be told, how could they build Google+ without taking a note
or two from the world's most popular social network? One thing that's different (and better) about Google+ is its ability to create "Circles" of friends by just dragging and dropping them from your list of friends to the group you want.

To make friend lists in Facebook, right now the easiest way is to click on the "Account" drop-down menu, select "Edit Friends" and then click on the "Create a List" button. From there, you choose your group's name and find and select your friends in the pop-up window and click on "Create List" to finalize it.

To make the process easier, four engineers from Facebook have teamed up to bring you a non-official tool called Circle Hack, which harnesses the power of Google Circles. To get started, just go to the Circle Hack website, log in to Facebook, and give the application permission to access your friends. Once done, you'll see a webpage horizontally split in two; the top half shows your entire friend list and the bottom half contains your "circles", where you can add to current groups or create new ones.

To create a new circle of friends, you can simply drag and drop a friend into the "Create New List" circle. You can also click on multiple friends, and drag and drop them all at once. Afterwards, click on "Create List" to give your new circle a name. It's that easy. You can also drag and drop friends into already created circles. When adding multiple friends, Circle Friends even includes a similar paperclip graphic that Google+ uses.

However, that's pretty much the gist of Circle Hack. You can create and add to groups, but you cannot edit privacy settings within the app, and you can't delete users from groups, view the friends in those groups, or delete entire circles. To do these things, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, directly in Facebook.

But it's a start and makes the process of creating new friend lists and adding to existing ones so much easier. For your lists in Facebook to actually be useful, you'll need to customize your privacy settings for each individual post.

Even though Google Plus Circles seems like a completely new thing, it's not that much different that Facebook's friend lists, according to Simon Cross, a partner engineer at Facebook. He tweeted this earlier this week: "Interesting that people think Google+Circles is new - seen Facebook Friend lists? This makes a good point: circlehack.com". While the concept might not be entirely new, Circles does improve upon Facebook's clunky interface.

On a side note, if you want to see how to import your friends from Google into Facebook, and vice versa, you can see how to do it here.