gender identity. You can also leave this gender text field blank.
After you fill out this information, click Sign Up (the big green button). Congratulations: You've officially joined Facebook!
FIGURE 2-1: Enter information here to create a Facebook account.
Checking Your Inbox
After you sign up for Facebook, you'll immediately receive an email in your inbox asking you to confirm your account. This may be the first of many emails Facebook sends you as it helps you get fully integrated into the Facebook world. Read on to learn how to respond to these emails and why they are important.
Confirmation
Confirmation is Facebook’s way of trying to make sure you are really you and that the email address you used to sign up is really yours. When you click the Sign Up button, Facebook sends you an email asking you to confirm your account. In other words, Facebook is double-checking that you are the person who owns your email address.
Go to your email, look for the Facebook message, and open it. (It will usually have a subject such as Welcome to Facebook or Facebook Confirmation.) That email contains a link or button. Your confirmation email may also contain a confirmation code that you will be asked to enter on Facebook’s website. Click the link or button, enter the confirmation code if prompted, and you will be confirmed.
Email outreach
After you’ve confirmed your email address Facebook considers you a full-fledged member of the site. However, it doesn’t want you to show up once and leave, so it may email you to remind you that you're now a Facebook user. These outreach emails have various subject lines, ranging from a notice that one of your new Facebook friends has updated his or her status, to a general notice that “You have more friends on Facebook than you think.” Clicking the links in these emails will open Facebook in your browser.
If you don’t like receiving these emails, you can unsubscribe by clicking the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any individual email. Facebook opens in your browser and asks if you're sure you want to unsubscribe from this type of email, as shown in Figure 2-2. Click Confirm to make it official.
FIGURE 2-2: Keep your inbox free of clutter.
Getting Started
Now that your account is confirmed, you’re ready to take Facebook by storm. Although you have this book to help guide you through the ins and outs of Facebook, lots of Facebook users do not. (How sad for them!) That’s why Facebook provides its users with numbered steps to help start them on the right foot.
In some cases, depending on whether you were invited to join Facebook by a friend or you joined with an email address from your workplace or school, you may see slightly different numbered steps than those detailed in the following sections. Don’t worry if this is the case; the same principles apply. This section covers the most basic parts of getting started: finding friends and making yourself recognizable to them by adding a profile picture.
Step 1: Adding a profile picture
Your Facebook timeline is the online representation of who you are. Most likely, you have online profiles for various websites. Facebook timelines tend to be a little more comprehensive and dynamic, for reasons that we detail in Chapter 5.
Your profile picture is one of the most important parts of your timeline. It’s a good first step to telling your friends all about you. And, significantly, it helps your friends identify you once you start sending friend requests.
You can add a profile picture by uploading a photo from your computer’s hard drive.
To add a profile picture from your hard drive, make sure you have a photo you want to use saved somewhere you can find it, and follow these steps:
1 Click the blue Add Picture button.This opens a window for browsing your computer’s hard drive. Use it to navigate to wherever you saved the photo you want to use as a profile picture.
2 Select your desired photo and click Choose, OK, or Open.This brings you back to where you started, except now there’s a preview of your new profile picture. You can choose to keep this photo or upload a different one.
Make a good first impression. Your profile picture is how you choose to represent yourself and one of the first ways people interact with your timeline. Most people choose pictures that are flattering or represent what’s important to them. Sometimes, profile pictures include other people — friends or significant others. Other times, the location matters. If the first photo you see of someone is at the beach rather than, say, at a party or in an office, you may draw different conclusions about that person. What picture represents you?
Consider who will see your profile picture. By default, your profile picture appears in search results that are visible to all of Facebook and can even be made available to the larger Internet population. So, generally, people who search for your name can see that picture. Make sure it's something you're comfortable with everyone seeing.
Choose a photo you like. As you use Facebook, you'll wind up seeing your own photo quite often. Small versions appear wherever you make a comment, post something, or are part of a group. So choose a photo you like looking at.
Realize that you’re not stuck with the photo. You can easily change
