Facebook Wants You to Make a List, Have Your Friends Check it Twice

Facebook wants you to share your to-do lists and rank your favorite things.

The company's new Lists feature will appear as an option on the status update bar. Facebook envisions users sharing their top five food cravings, goals for the year, and plans for upcoming trips through the new feature, which is designed to spark conversations with your friends.

The company said the rollout will be slow, so the feature might not pop up for you immediately. But when it does, you'll be able to create lists that can be personalized with different colors and emoji and organized via bullet points or numbers. (Android users will have access to the feature first, although iOS users will be able to see the created lists on Facebook.)

In addition, you'll be able to "clone" any lists you see in your Facebook News Feed and nudge your friends to answer the lists you post.

The new feature comes as Facebook has been vowing to make its platform better for society. The company's own research has found that passively consuming information over Facebook can be bad for your mental health. So it's striving to encourage more discussions among friends and family.

Rumors of a possible list-creation feature appeared last month when the company appeared to be testing it among select users. On Tuesday, Facebook's head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, pushed back on claims that lists are designed to collect advertising information on your favorite subjects.

"Actually we built lists because we saw lots of people creating lists as long statuses and with pictures, and thought it would be good to make it easier for people to create lists first class," he tweeted. " I hope we can get to a point, someday, where you don't always assume ill intent."

:story: PC Magazine