To use Trusted Contacts, you can log into Facebook and go to your security settings, where you pick three or more friends to serve as your Trusted Contacts. Facebook then notifies those people that you’ve picked them, and if you ever got locked out of your account, you can ask those people to request security codes for you. Once you have three codes, you’ll be able to get into your account. You won’t have to answer security questions to get your password.

Password security is a hot topic right now, as we’ve become even more susceptible to internet hacks that can destroy personal information and leave us digitally stranded. And as the recent hack of the AP’s Twitter account proved, these hacks can have real financial and security implications for companies as well.

Facebook’s move is similar to two-factor authentication that we wrote Twitter should adopt, and which the company reportedly is working to add, although Facebook’s method uses your friends rather than a smartphone to supply the codes. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have recently stepped up password security options for their users, and it’s becoming somewhat of a must-have.

Facebook previously introduced a Trusted Friends feature in 2011 that let you designate friends to help in case you were locked out of your account, and Trusted Contacts is something of an update to that product, notifying your friends in advance.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Unlike Julia Angwin, who says she unfriended everyone she was connected to because Facebook “cannot provide me the level of privacy that I need,” I don’t really have any issues with privacy on Facebook. Angwin said that she was troubled by the fact that “when I share information with a certain group or friend on Facebook, I am often surprised by where the data ends up,” and I respect her decision. But that’s not what bothered me about using the social network.

It’s not the privacy, it’s the overload

For better or worse, I made a deliberate decision when I joined the service (and Twitter, and almost every other social network) to be as open as possible, and to share almost everything about myself, within reason. I would never say that everyone should do this, and there are plenty of reasons why people keep certain things off the web — information about their children, for example — but for the most part I agree with Jeff Jarvis that the benefits of “publicness” outweigh the disadvantages.

So if privacy wasn’t the problem, what was it? In a nutshell, information overload. In the same way I’ve had to struggle with my addiction to real-time connectedness on a mobile device (something I wrote about recently that many readers disagreed with), I started to find that Facebook was a painful experience. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the problem was partly me — and the way I was using it — and partly the way Facebook was changing.

I started to think about how some people I admire, including Union Square Ventures founder Fred Wilson, had pared back their use of Facebook by unfriending a lot of people. And such thoughts don’t seem to be unique: a recent survey by the Pew Center showed that two-thirds of users had taken an extended break, and close to 30 percent were planning to use Facebook less.

Partly Facebook and partly me

The part of this that I think was my fault stems from the way I set up my account when I first joined Facebook in 2006: in keeping with my desire to push the limits of openness, I accepted friend requests from almost everyone who sent them, even if they weren’t actually “friends.” And yes, I knew at the time that doing this carried some risk, but I didn’t fully appreciate what it would be like, or how it would eventually ruin the experience for me.

What I wound up with was almost a thousand “friends,” many of whom were people I had met at conferences, or people who were connected to me through others, or some who were just fans of my writing (who can still use the “subscribe” feature). To these people — all of whom I have since unfriended — I would just like to say that you are all wonderful, but I couldn’t take it any more. My stream became a sea of information I had little or no interest in, with only a few scattered pieces of flotsam and jetsam from the people who I am actually close to.

The part of this that I see as Facebook’s fault has to do with how cluttered my stream became, especially with all of the “sponsored stories” and “liked” pages that began to show up more and more — when a “friend” liked a page about Coca-Cola or Ford, for example. And yes, just like the notifications I complained about on the iPhone, I know that Facebook has knobs and dials that you can tweak so that you don’t see certain things. But who has the time to spend twiddling all those dials all the time? I certainly don’t.

Facebook has just become less relevant

So what happened after The Great Unfriending? Facebook became a whole lot more usable as a particular kind of network — the one that lets me see what actual friends and family are doing, including those who are far away (the kind of “ambient intimacy” that researcher Leisa Reichelt talks about). Except for my teenaged daughters, of course, who don’t even use Facebook any more, preferring to spend all their time on Tumblr and Twitter. That’s just one of the things that should worry Mark Zuckerberg, I think.

What I am left with is a more useful network, but also one that I only use for very specific things, and don’t really spend much time on. If I want to connect with people related to work, I do it through LinkedIn; if I want to connect to people through photos, I do it on Instagram or Flickr (which is why Instagram was such a smart acquisition for Facebook to make); and if I want to connect to people I don’t really know, I use Twitter. If I could get more of my friends to use Path, I might use that for friends and family, in which case I wouldn’t need Facebook at all.

Facebook has a whole series of challenges as it tries to grow and justify its $65 billion market value. But its biggest problem — bigger than the shift to mobile or the need to generate ad revenue — is that it has to not only remain relevant in people’s lives, but offer them more and more things that will keep them engaged. For me at least, and it seems for others as well, they are losing that battle.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Stuart Jenner and Flickr user Pew Center

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Subscriptions will appear as a button on a user’s profile, or on each post that shows up in your news feed. Click on it, and you can choose to see all updates from someone, most updates (the current default), or just the most important life-change updates (e.g., baby, marriage, moving, new job). For example, you can also get more specific about what you see from people. You can say you want to see only pictures from certain people, or everything except the apps they install.

Subscriptions also let you subscribe to people you’re not friends with on Facebook, meaning that person’s public posts will show up in your news feed. But don’t think this is just a more convenient way to anonymously Facebook-stalk someone; they can easily find out who’s following them via notifications. Instead, think of it as a simpler “fan page” for public figures on Facebook, a little easier than maintaining a personal page for only friends and a public page that anyone can “like” to receive updates from that page in their news feed.

Update: Facebook users who’d rather not have anyone subscribing to them at all have the option of removing the button from their profile do not have to turn on the subscriber option. It’s an opt-in feature. There’s also no requirement to use subscribe to keep track of Facebook friends, either. Just adding someone as a friend on the network will continue to function as usual, without any interaction with the subscription feature.

Facebook admits this isn’t necessarily something everyone will want to use, and for now at least, they see it as a “power user” feature. Friend subscriptions will start to show up for some users Wednesday, and roll out to most others over the next few days.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google doesn’t like walled gardens — except its own
• Twitter Annotations and the Future of the Semantic Web
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

Facebook made some pretty huge privacy changes last month, which included introducing tag approval and better controls over how information is shared with specific groups. This month, the social network is revealing even more tools to help users automatically categorize their friends, control who views the content they post, and allow users to decide whose status updates and photos they see the most and least.

The biggest change that being introduced Tuesday is to friend lists, with a new feature called Smart Lists. Friend lists, or the ability to group people by how you know them (college, work, family), and only share certain information with certain groups, were introduced three years ago. But Facebook knows that having to go back and categorize how you know people and manually adding them to a list is, well, tedious.

“It’s pretty silly that I have to sit down for an afternoon and categorize these people by hand,” said Facebook product manager Blake Ross. So they’re going to do it for you.

Many people on Facebook already share information that makes it easy to group people by, such as where they went to school, where they work and where they live. So Smart Lists will automatically group your Facebook friends in these different categories: family, city, high school, college and work. All the people in your feed who listed that they went to your same high school or college will automatically be added to those feeds, and all the people who list where they work will be added to your work friends group.

The point of enhancing this feature is to take the task of categorizing your Facebook friends off your plate when the information is already there, says Facebook. Once that’s done, you can then decide whether to share a certain status message or photo with a particular group via the dropdown menu in the status bar introduced last month.

The new Smart Lists are also customizable after Facebook has set them for you. Most importantly, you can turn Smart Lists off altogether if you want to. But if Facebook has added, say, your brother’s ex-wife to your family Smart List, you can always remove her from that list permanently. And if it adds friends to your college Smart List that are, for instance, 30 years older than you, but also happen to have gone to your same college, you can fix that too. Just specify what age group of your school’s graduates from your friend lists you want on there.

The end goal is to help people to be selective about who they share with. “I don’t have to share every bit of information will all of my friends,” said Ross.

Facebook is also acknowledging that you don’t necessarily want to read every single bit of information that all of your Facebook friends share either. So it is introducing the ability to group people as “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances.”

You can add the 10 or 15 people from whom you want to see all of their status updates, pictures, events, etc. to Close Friends. People you know, but you don’t want to see the minutiae of their life, are good to add to Acquaintances. Of these people, you’ll only see major life events show up in your news feed, like when they get married, move cities and list a new job.

These groups won’t be automatically generated like Smart Lists; these you will have to do yourself. Once you’ve put them together though, they will show up in your left rail and you can click them to get a news feed of just close friends or just acquaintances. This will be familiar to those who’ve been using Google+.

You can then share specific information with these lists as well. Facebook says it will not tell people they’ve been added to a list, but it will show them the other people a status or picture has been shared with, which Facebook says is to provide “more context.” This is in line with comments Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made earlier this summer, when he criticized the Google+ “circles” concept because people never know what circle, or group, they’ve been added to. “The definition of groups is … everyone inside the group knows who else is in the group,” he said at the time.

Ross said these changes will begin to roll out Wednesday, and most users should see the changes to their account in the next two weeks.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google doesn’t like walled gardens — except its own
• NewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the Rise
• 5 NewNet Milestones That Won’t Happen in 2011

Facebook: Friend Request Pending

From the Friends menu, go to All Friends. People who haven’t responded to your friend request will be listed as “Friend Request Pending”. If you like, you can create a “Pending” group so that pending friends are easy to find. Just remember to move them to another group once they respond.

LinkedIn: Sent Invitations

From the main menu, go to Contacts. Above your list of Connections, you’ll see a link to “[X number of] outstanding sent invitations” which will take you to the “Sent: Invitations” page. (You can also get there using this link.) Click on the word “Status” to sort the invitations by status. Scroll through the list and look for messages marked “Sent”. Once a person connects with you, their status will change to “Accepted”.

Once you’ve reviewed the lists of pending connections, you can follow up and see why they haven’t responded. I find such conversations to be great icebreakers regarding the usefulness of social networks.

Do you know why your invitations to connect are still pending?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Mail.com Acquires Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Blog; terms not disclosed, Finke’s blog to expand and is looking to hire a senior journalist in New York. (MediaMemo)

Qik Joins Up with Brightcove; mobile video provider will allow users with Brightcove accounts to publish through Brightcove players and integrate ads. (Brightcove Blog)

Friends Reunite on Web Therapy; the Lexus-sponsored Lisa Kudrow show kicks off its second season with Courtney Cox as a guest star. Unlike last time, Therapy will be syndicated beyond Lexus’ site to Hulu, YouTube and iTunes. (The Hollywood Reporter)

TiVo Partners with Quantcast; the two companies will combine efforts to offer audience data that includes both TV viewing and web surfing. (MediaWeek)

Tron Guy Selling His Plane; tough times hit the Web celeb who is selling his 2008 AMD Zodiac XLi, for which he paid $140,000, on eBay. (WIRED)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room