So, back in August I wrote about Facebookand the perils of prodigious sociability - that the “one giant bucket for all your friends” nature of the site was a limiting and messy experience. At the time, I sketched out a possible workaround: making custom groups which users can then sort their “friends” into, and set permissions on a per-group basis.

My solution involved using the existing “groups” functionality to manage subsets of friends, but better still would be to have the potential for grouping people within the mega list, right?

Well, the first bit has happened:

Facebook has now added the ability to group your friends into custom groups. You can name each group and create as many groups as you like.

The ability to assign permissions on a per-group basis isn’t there yet, which is weird - without that possibility, there’s not a huge amount of point to grouping your friends, apart from making the list more manageable. But it looks like it’s on the way, at least…