Facebook removes options to filter friends by city, but some alternatives exist
Some Facebook users have been disappointed to discover that they can no longer filter their friends list by current city or other identifiers besides name.
When Facebook rolled out its redesigned friends page last month, it removed the option to search friends by current city, workplace, school, hometown and interest. Instead, the social network offers a way to view friends from a user’s own high school, college or workplace, as well as a way to view “recently added” friends, but these options are more limited. We’ve seen a number of questions and complaints in the community forums of Facebook’s Help Center about this change.
A Facebook spokesperson explained, “We try and simplify features when possible based on usage patterns. This is something we’re open to considering again in the future.”
Users who want to know which of their friends live in a city they’re thinking about visiting or work for a company they’re interested in can no longer use the search function on their friends page as a shortcut, but there are some alternatives. Users can visit business or place pages directly to see which of their friends are connected to them and how. City pages let users know whether their friends visited the city, lived there, worked there, was born there or went to school there.
Business or fan pages that have been claimed by the entity have less information. Users can see if a friend Likes the page or has visited, but they can’t see whether their friends worked for a company or attended a school. This used to be possible before Timeline, but was never brought to the new page layout.
Before shot of friends page via Cass Sapir.
