Three improvements have been made to lists. Smart Lists are created automatically by Facebook. These lists use profile information to sort friends into Work, School, Family and City smart lists. You may have noticed that those are all based on profile information. This should make it easier according to Facebook to share with a particular group of friends on the site, for instance with college friends or family to plan the next vacation.

For instance, if you list Boston College as a school you’ve attended and your friends John and Sarah do too, then you would instantly have a smart list called “Boston College” with John and Sarah on it. This means that if you’re having a grad party or a college reunion, you can easily share photos with just your college friends, without bothering other people you know.

It is possible to customize those lists to remove or add friends manually to make them more accurate.

The Close Friends and Acquaintances Lists are manual lists that do not get populated automatically. Facebook users can move their best friends into the Close Friends list to see everything they post in their News Feed. Acquaintances on the other hand can be old classmates or business contacts, but Facebook will only show important events like when they marry or move to a new city.

There is also a Restricted list for people that Facebook users like but do not want to share with, like their boss or parents for instance.

Okay, what about your boss or the few other people you like but just don’t want to share with on Facebook? You can add these folks to your Restricted list and they will only see your Public posts. You’ll still be friends on Facebook so you can send them messages or tag them in a post if you want to connect to them from time to time. It’s totally up to you.

The third improvement is a better suggestions algorithm for all types of friend lists on Facebook. It basically allows users to add new friends to a new or existing list to make the process more fluent and straightforward.

Each list has its own news feed, and it is also possible to post a status update to one of the existing lists directly from the post form.

The new and improved Friend lists on Facebook will be available to all of the social networking site’s users later this week.

The options move Facebook closer to the circles of Google Plus. Users who have not configured Friend Lists yet will be able to use Smart Lists automatically which might be enough to convince them to use the lists feature on Facebook in the future.

You may have noticed the chat interface in the lower right corner of the Facebook website. It indicates that you are online, and displays the number of friends that are online and available for chat.

A click on the chat indicator expands the interface. All online Facebook friends are now shown along with a link to friends lists and the options. The easiest way to drop out of chat is to click on the small green and white switch that you see next to Other Friends. If you click it you go offline and none of your friends will see that you are actually online and available for chat.

You can alternatively click on Options > Go Offline which sets your status to offline until the next time that you click on chat.

The two options so far are there to go completely offline on Facebook, so that no one can see that you are online. Some Facebook users may prefer to stay online for select friends, and offline for others.

Enter Friend Lists. You can create Friend Lists on Facebook group your friends. You may want to create a group for your family, one for work or school, and maybe another for your football buddies or poker group. You can then select to be online or offline for each individual friend list that you have created.

You create a new friend list with a click on chat and the selection of Friend Lists at the top of the window.

Enter a descriptive name for the new group and hit return. It should now appear in the chat listing. Move your mouse cursor over the new list and select the edit link next to it. Edit only appears if you mouse over the new group.

Facebook displays all of your friends in a new overlay window. You can add friends to the selected group with a click on their profile photo. Once you are done click the Save List button to save the list.

You can now go offline selectively so that selected friends will see that you are online and available, while others won’t see that you are online on Facebook.

Have another Facebook tip to share? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Facebook has changed the chat layout recently. You now need to click on the options icon at the bottom row of the chat bar and select Limit Availability from the options.

Facebook displays an overlay window on selection that looks like this.

Here you can then limit your availability by selecting the user groups that you want to be visible for. For that, you need to create friend lists. You cannot do this anymore in the chat interface. For that you need to click on the Friends link in the upper left corner of your Facebook page and then on the Manage Friend List button at the top.

You can then click on the Create List button near the top to create new lists or add friends to existing lists.

Well, my prayers have been answered somewhat. I can’t stop receiving invites but I can block them so I don’t have ten friends sending me invitations for the same app over and over again. To do this, head over the ‘Requests’ page on your Facebook profile. There, you’ll see a list of all the invitations you received. Under the ‘Accept’ and ‘Ignore’ buttons is a small option that says ‘Block this application‘. Click on it and you’re done.

Considering the sheer number of invitations I’ve received, It will take me forever to block them all. I think a better option is to ignore all invitations from friends who keep sending you rubbish. This way, you cut it off at the source.

Has the Facebook application madness driven you crazy yet? What’s your strategy on dealing with them? Does it want to make you abandon Facebook altogether? Let me know in the comments.