Facebook: filtering my status updates

So let’s say I have 200 friends on FB and there are certain status updates where I only wish to let 20 people see what I’ve written. How do I filter out those other 180 people from seeing my post?

I’ve tried Googling and everything I get is for filtering out my friends’ status updates, which isn’t what I’m looking for.
The best I’ve been able to determine is that I can create in the privacy settings a select group that can see my status updates but as far as I can determine that’s ALL my status updates, which means I’m either permanently locked into the new filter or I ignore it all the time. That’s obviously not what I want.

I just want to occassionally post something that some friends can’t read. Like LiveJournal would have.

Help?

When you post, you’ll have privacy options in the form of a lock. Click on that. You can then name people you want to be able to see your updates.

Easiest way is to create lists/groups of friends and label all your friends. From there you can use the privacy settings to control which groups see what.

Word of warning, check the settings periodically. With the most recent facebook update of how the info/interest/activities/etc pages are organized… Facebook conveniently decided to set my privacy options to their default of EVERYONE and erase my previous settings.

And the way to check that is to read one post up.

Can we have a stick that contains a link to the FaceBook FAQ or something?

Thanks for your help all. It’s not terribly difficult, but - thanks to the lack of privacy concerns on behalf of FB - it wasn’t terribly intuitive either. But I’ve got it sorted out now and created my own filter for posting.

I don’t think that would be nearly as helpful as a thread that explains the options. The FAQ/Help is instantly available the entire time you are on facebook. One can even search for help items. I’m betting that, if that information were sufficient, we wouldn’t have so many questions in the first place.