of winter, and that photo of you hiking last summer is just too depressing to look at? No problem; simply edit your profile picture. After you’ve uploaded your profile picture, you’ll also see an option to make the picture temporary for any period of time between 1 hour and forever. If you set it for a length of time with an end date, your profile picture will simply revert to the previous profile picture on that date. See Chapter 5 for details.
Step 2: Finding your friends
Now that your profile picture is in place, it’s time to find your friends. Without friends, Facebook can feel a bit like going to an amusement park alone. Sure, the rides were fun and the food was greasy, but no one was there to appreciate it with you.
To find your friends, follow these steps:
1 Enter a name or email in the search field.Facebook might show you a drop-down list with possible matches. You can choose someone from the list or click the Return or Enter key to search for the name you typed in the search field.
2 Browse the results.Facebook shows you a list of people with exact or similar names to what you typed, as shown in Figure 2-3. To ensure that you’ve found the correct person, click the name and check out that person's timeline and profile picture.FIGURE 2-3: Find your friends early and often.
3 Use the filters in the left sidebar.If you’re looking for someone with a common name, the list of suggestions might seem endless. Never fear! Facebook gives you some handy-dandy filters in the left sidebar to narrow your search. Your options are to filter by Friends of Friends (particularly useful if you have mutual friends), City, Education, or Work.
4 Send a friend request.After you have determined that this is your friend, click the Add Friend icon to the right or below the person’s name.
5 Repeat, repeat, repeat.Keep searching and keep friending. We discuss more ways to find friends in Chapter 8, but this is a good way to get started. Depending on how you joined Facebook, you may see a few friend suggestions waiting for you below the friend search tool. These are people that Facebook thinks you may know. If you know them, great — go ahead and send a friend request. If not, you can click the Remove button to get rid of the suggestion. Sometimes, you might find friends in the search results but you don’t see an option to send them a friend request. If this is the case, they might have set their privacy to allow requests only from friends of friends or people who are already Facebook friends with someone that they’re Facebook friends with. Try sending them a message (see Chapter 9) to let them know you’d like to be Facebook friends.
Step 3: Getting to know your privacy settings
Click the blue Take a Privacy Tour button to learn more about your privacy settings and options. We won’t get into Facebook’s many privacy settings here. For the skinny on all things privacy, head to Chapter 6.
Introducing Your New Home Page
After you complete the last step in the preceding section, you’ll see your Home page in all its glory. The Home page (see Figure 2-4) is what you see each time you log in to Facebook.
FIGURE 2-4: Home sweet Home page.
While some parts of the Home page remain the same (such as the top bar and left sidebar), the bulk of what you see is constantly changing. This is because the Home page contains the News Feed, which is essentially a real-time newspaper filled with updates showing you what your friends are posting, sharing, and talking about on Facebook.
At the beginning of this chapter, we point out that Facebook gets exponentially better after you have friends. Until your friends respond to your requests, you may not see much on the Home page except prompts to learn more about Facebook, find more friends, or create your own post. After you add the people you know as friends, take a break. Stretch. Go for a walk. Drink some water. Come back over the next few days to see the interesting photos, status updates, and links your friends are sharing.
FIGURE 2-5: Little boxes like this one point out how and why to use different Facebook features.
AM I TOO OLD FOR FACEBOOK?
Are you too old for Facebook? Most emphatically, no. Although how people use the site can be different at different ages, Facebook’s utility and nature aren’t limited to being useful to only young people.
More and more people in older age demographics are signing up for Facebook every day to keep in touch with friends and family members, share photos, create events, and connect with local organizations. Almost everything we discuss in this book is non-age-specific. Everyone — young or old, in college, working, or retired — has networks of friends and people with whom they interact daily. Facebook tries to map these real-world connections to make it easier for people to share information with their friends. Generally, you should feel confident that you and your friends can connect and use Facebook in a meaningful way.
More than two billion people are using Facebook, and that number isn’t made up of “a bunch of kids.” Rather, it’s a bunch of people from every age group, every country, and every walk of life.
Adding More Friends
As a new user logging into Facebook, Facebook overwhelmingly seems to want you to do one thing — add more friends. You may be seeing the updates of friends in your News Feed, but you are almost certainly seeing previews of people you may know with big buttons prompting you to Add Friend. You may see these previews in your News Feed and even on your timeline.
Facebook finds people to recommend as friends based largely on the people you're already friends with. Each time you see a Person You May Know suggestion, you can choose to ignore the suggestion by clicking the tiny X in the upper-right
