IN THIS CHAPTER

Signing up and getting started

Adding information about yourself

Finding friends

Getting confirmed and managing emails

Chapter 1 covers why you might want to join Facebook. In this chapter, I get you signed up and ready to go on Facebook. Keep a couple of things in mind when you sign up. First, Facebook becomes exponentially more useful and more fun when you start adding friends. Without friends, it can feel kind of dull. Second, your friends may take a few days to respond to your Friend Requests, so be patient. Even if your first time on Facebook isn’t as exciting as you hope, be sure to come back and try again over the following weeks. Third, you can have only one account on Facebook. Facebook links accounts to email addresses or phone numbers, and your email address (or number) can be linked to only one account. This system enforces a world where people are who they say they are on Facebook.

Signing Up for Facebook

Officially, all you need to join Facebook is a valid email address or phone number. When I say valid email, I just mean that you need to be able to easily access the messages in that account because Facebook emails you a registration confirmation. A valid phone number means a mobile phone number that can send and receive text messages, since Facebook will text you your registration confirmation. Figure 2-1 shows the crucial part of the sign-up page, which you can find by navigating to www.facebook.com.

As you can see, you need to fill out a few things:

• First and Last Name: Facebook is a place based on real identity. Sign up with the name people know you by. I don’t recommend signing up with a fake name or alias because that will make it hard for you to be found by friends. After you’ve signed up, you can add nicknames or maiden names to your Timeline to make it even easier for friends to find you. But for now, just use your real first and last names.

• Mobile Number or Email: You need to enter your valid email address or phone number here. Facebook asks you to enter this information twice to make sure that there are no typos and your emails or texts will get to you.

  If you’re signing up for Facebook with a phone number, it needs to be a mobile phone number. Your home phone number can’t get texts, so it won’t help you sign up for Facebook.

• New Password: As with all passwords, using a combination of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks is a good idea for your Facebook password. It’s probably not a good idea to use the same password for every site you join, so I recommend using something unique for Facebook. Facebook requires passwords to be at least six characters long.
• Birthday: Enter your date of birth. If you’re shy about sharing your birthday, don’t worry: You’ll be able to hide this information on your Timeline later.
• Sex (Female or Male): Facebook uses your gender information to construct sentences about you on the site. For example, you might see a News Feed story that reads “Carolyn updated her profile picture.” If you are transgender or use a nonstandard gender pronoun, you’ll have the ability to change this in your settings.

After you fill out this information, click Create Account (that’s the big green button). Congratulations: You officially joined Facebook!

When you click Create Account, you’re agreeing to Facebook’s Terms of Service and Data Policy. Most websites have similar terms and policies, but if you’re curious about just what Facebook’s are, you can always follow the Terms and Data Policy links just above the big green Create Account button.

Getting Started

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 puts all its users through a Getting Started Wizard to help start them out on the right foot. In certain 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 get slightly different steps than those detailed in the following sections. You may be asked to confirm your email address (which is covered in the “What to Expect In Your Inbox” section). You may not even see a Getting Started Wizard as it appears in the screenshots. Don’t worry; the same principles apply: You want to find your friends and set up your profile. This section covers the most basic parts of getting started: finding your friends and making yourself recognizable to friends by adding a profile picture.

Step 1: Find Your Friends

The Find Your Friends step, shown in Figure 2-2, is first because it’s that important to enjoying Facebook. Without friends, Facebook can feel a little 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.

You have many ways to find friends on Facebook. All of them are covered in Chapter 8, as well as talking more about what friendship really means on Facebook. The method Facebook is highlighting in this step is the Friend Finder.

The Friend Finder works by allowing Facebook access to your email account. Facebook then combs through your email contacts and matches the emails it finds with emails attached to the Facebook accounts of the people you email. So if Joe Smith, your friend, emailed you from [email protected] and had a Facebook account he created with that email address, the Friend Finder presents you with Joe’s name and profile picture and asks if you want to be friends on Facebook.

To use the Friend Finder, follow these steps:

1. Select the email provider you're using.

   This may be Outlook.com (or Hotmail), Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, or another email client. Facebook automatically selects a provider based on the email you used to register.

   Depending on what email service you use, importing your contacts and looking for friends may entail a few extra steps. You may need to export your email contacts into a .csv file. You may be brought to the website of your email provider to log in to your email account. Log in and follow any necessary prompts to allow Facebook to access your contacts list.

2. Enter your email address and email password.

   Remember to enter your email password, not the password you just created for Facebook.

3. Click Find Friends.

   Behind the scenes, Facebook searches your contact list and presents you with the people in your email Contacts list who are already on Facebook. By default, all these people are selected to be your friends.

4. Look through the list and choose the people you want to be friends with on Facebook by clicking their names.

   I talk more about who, exactly, should be your Facebook friends in Chapter 8, but for now, a good rule is to look for people you’re friends with or related to in real life. You can deselect the people you don’t want to add by clicking their faces or the check boxes.

   This isn’t your only opportunity to use the Friend Finder. If you aren’t sure about adding a lot of people right away, that’s okay. Chapter 8 shows you how to get back to these steps at any point in time.

5. Click Add Friends.

   This sends Friend Requests to all the people you selected in Step 4. On Facebook, all friendships must be agreed to by both people. A request to your friend needs to be approved by her before you are officially Facebook friends.

   After you add friends, Facebook looks at the email addresses it didn’t find matches for and asks you whether you want to invite those people to join Facebook.

6. Select people you want to invite to join Facebook.

   By default, all your friends are selected to be invited. You can click the Select all/None box at the top of the list to deselect everyone. You can also deselect people individually by clicking the boxes next to their names.

   If you don’t want to invite anyone to join Facebook just yet, look on the bottom right of the screen for a Skip link. It’s right next to the Send Invites button.

7. Click Send Invites to send out invitations to your friends via email.

   They’ll receive emails from Facebook letting them know you invited them to join.

The Friend Finder is very useful when you’re just getting started on Facebook because it allows you to find a whole bunch of friends all at once. If you had to look for each of your friends by name, it could take a while. Friend Finder allows you to speed up that process.

Step 2: Profile Picture

Your Facebook Profile, or 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 I detail in Chapter 5.

Your Profile Picture is one of the most important parts of your Timeline. It’s a good first step towards starting to tell your friends all about you. And, significantly, it helps your friends identify you. Remember all those friend requests you sent while you were using the Friend Finder? When those friends see your request, it will be much easier for them to verify that you’re you if they can see a photo of you. Step 2, adding a profile picture, is shown in Figure 2-3.

If you’ve already been through the Getting Started Wizard or aren’t seeing the wizard as it appears in Figure 2-3, click the Edit Profile link on the right side of the screen and then click Add Profile Picture when you arrive on the Edit Profile page. The instructions below assume you are looking at the Getting Started Wizard, so may not match the steps you take from the Edit Profile page exactly, though they are very similar.

You can add a profile picture in one of two ways. You can either upload a photo from your computer’s hard drive or, if you have a computer with a built-in webcam, you can take a photo you want to use.

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 Add Picture.

   This opens a window for browsing your computer’s hard drive. Use it to navigate to wherever you saved the photo you wanted to use as a profile picture.

2. Select your desired photo and click Choose or OK.

   This brings you back to the Getting Started Wizard, except now there’s a preview of your new profile picture.

3. Click Next.

If you want to use your computer’s webcam to take a profile picture, follow these steps:

1. Click the Take a Photo link.

   This opens a dialog box for accessing your computer’s webcam. You may have to click Allow before Facebook is able to work with your computer to show an image of you.

2. Strike a pose and click the Take Photo button.

   Once the photo has been taken, it displays in the dialog box. You can choose to retake the photo if you don’t like the way your smile looks.

3. Click Save.

I talk a lot about your profile picture and the many ways it's used on Facebook in Chapter 5, but here are a few quick tips on selecting a profile picture:

• Make a good first impression. Your profile picture is one of the first ways people interact with your Timeline and how you choose to represent yourself. Most people pick pictures that are flattering or that 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 versus at a party or sitting at his desk, 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.
• Pick a photo you like. As you use Facebook, you 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 pick a photo you like looking at.

• You’re not stuck with it. After I put all this pressure on you to pick the perfect photo, keep in mind that you can easily change your profile picture at any time. Is it the dead of winter, and that photo of you on the beach last summer is just too depressing to look at? No problem; simply edit your profile picture, which you can find out how to do in Chapter 5.

What to Expect in Your Inbox

After you sign up for Facebook, you will immediately see an email arrive in your Inbox asking you to confirm your account. This will 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.

Your New Home Page

After you complete your Getting Started Wizard, you arrive at your Home page. This is where Facebook starts to look like the Facebook you would see if you’d been using the site for a while already. The Home page is what you see when you log in to Facebook.

What’s interesting about the Facebook Home page is that while some parts remain the same (such as the big blue bar on top, and the menu on the left-hand side), the bulk of what you see is constantly changing. This is because the Home page (also known as the News Feed) updates to show you what your friends are posting, sharing, and talking about on Facebook.

At the beginning of this chapter, I point out that Facebook gets exponentially better once you have friends. This is absolutely true on the Home page. Until your friends respond to your requests, you may not see much here except prompts to learn more about Facebook, find more friends, or fill out more profile information beyond your profile picture. After you add the people you know as friends, take a break. Stretch. Take 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.

As you navigate around Facebook for the first time, you may notice small boxes popping up in different parts of the screen (there’s an example of one such box in Figure 2-4). Don’t ignore these guys! They are trying to teach you tips and tricks to get you comfortable using Facebook.

Adding More Friends

As a new user logging into Facebook, there seems to be one overwhelming thing that Facebook wants you to do — 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 on the right side of your Home page, in your News Feed, even on your Timeline.

Facebook finds people to recommend you add as friends based largely on the people you are already friends with (this is a vastly oversimplified explanation of the find friends algorithm, but the longer explanation involves more math). Each time you see a “Person You May Know” you can choose to ignore the suggestion by clicking the tiny X button in the upper-right corner or click the Add Friend button.

I always hesitate to give too much advice in terms of whether or not you should add someone as a friend. In general, especially when you are just starting out, I lean towards adding everyone you know and care about. Family, friends, coworkers, teammates, classmates — add ’em all. Adding more friends will make your News Feed more interesting, and Facebook will learn over time whom, exactly, you find most interesting.

On Facebook, friendships are reciprocal. You don’t officially become Facebook friends with others until they have approved your friend request.

On the flip side, I would not recommend adding people you don’t like as friends. Yes, I mean that one person from your last job who was always super nice to you but secretly drove you insane. Or that second cousin twice removed who always asks you inappropriate questions about your love life. Don’t feel obligated to click Add Friends simply because you know someone.

Categories of people you may not want to add as friends are teachers, doctors, students, or other people you know and like but who you would like to maintain a more professional distance from. Facebook is often a place where people are casual, let their (virtual) hair down, and don’t censor. It can be weird or even inappropriate to see your therapist venting about her patients or for your boss to see photos of you relaxing at the beach when you claimed you were home sick.

Chapter 8 provides much more information about the nuances of friendship and how to know whom to add.

Filling out Your Profile Information

Getting your Timeline set up is not a requirement for starting to use Facebook. In fact, your Timeline is something that gets built up over time (and doing so is covered in Chapter 5), so I wouldn’t give you such a Herculean task right away.

However, there are a few basic pieces of information that will help you find your friends on Facebook, as well as helping your friends identify you when you send them a friend request. These are your current workplace, current city, any schools you’ve attended, and your hometown. Especially if you have a common name, this information can really help someone who is regarding a friend request figure out if you are in fact Jane Smith from Portland (who they definitely want to be friends with) or Jane Smith from Seattle (who, maybe not so much).

To add this basic profile information, follow these steps:

1. From your Home page, click your name in the big blue bar on top of the screen.

   This takes you to your profile.

2. Click the About tab.

   It is located underneath your name. Clicking it takes you to the About section of your profile, which is likely empty at this time.

3. Click Add a workplace or Add a school.

   Clicking any of these links opens an interface for typing in the name of your workplace, college, or high school, respectively.

4. Start typing the name of your workplace or school.

   Facebook autocompletes, or attempts to guess at what you’re typing as you type. So, for example, if you start typing “m-i-c” Facebook will display a menu of possible company matches — Microsoft, Mic Media, Michael Kors, and so on.

5. Select your workplace or school when you see it appear in the autocomplete menu.

   If your workplace doesn’t appear in the autocomplete menu, simply finish typing its name and press Enter.

6. (Optional) Add more details about your work or school.

   You can add information like your specific job title, major, year of graduation, and more.

7. Click Save Changes.

   The blue Save Changes button is at the bottom of the section you are editing.

To the left of the Save Changes button, a small globe icon and the word “Public” lets you know that once you save it, this information is publicly available. Anyone can see it. I talk more about what this means in Chapter 6.

To add your hometown and current city from the About section of your profile, click the Places You’ve Lived link on the left side of the page (underneath Work and Education). You can then click to add your current city and hometown the same way you added your work and education information. You can also edit this information from the Overview section.