Newbie's guide to Facebook

What is Facebook and why should you use it?

Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect with friends, co-workers, and others who share similar interests or who have common backgrounds. Many use it as a way to stay in touch after finishing school, and as a way to share their life publicly.

What makes Facebook different from other social networks are its extensive privacy controls, development platform, and its large and quickly growing user base. Facebook has been called the "thinking person's" social network. Compared to many other social networks, Facebook gets new features and improvements on a regular basis.

Setup
Facebook, like other social networks, is all about getting in touch with others. Luckily for novice users, Facebook has created some simple ways to find your friends using just your e-mail address, or the buddy list from your AOL instant messaging account. You can also do a search by name, or pull up listings based on your computer's address book.

To get started adding friends to Facebook (many of who may already be on the system), we recommend a multi-pronged attack. Use your most active Web mail account (say Hotmail for example), and your AIM buddy list, which in some cases could pull up nearly everyone you know. Since everyone needs an e-mail address to sign up with Facebook, giving Facebook permission to use your existing address books should make it possible to track down everyone you communicate with.

Once you've added the people you know or remember (you can always add or delete them later on), one of your first steps should be filling out your own profile. You're welcome to do this before tracking down your friends, but you'll find that people are almost always constantly making tweaks to their profile, so nothing is set in stone.The two main things that are important here are a personal picture, and your contact information -- both of which Facebook highlights when you're first setting things up. For profile pictures, it can be anything you'd like, and you can simply upload it to the service from your hard drive. Filling out the rest of your profile is as simple as completing any Web form. You're not required to include anything about yourself, so don't feel too inclined to fill out information you don't want others to see, which brings us to the topic of privacy, which you can read more about after the break....

Continue reading to learn about privacy, saying hello, what a poke is, sharing bookmarks, and using Facebook applications. We'll also delve into some advanced items like add-ons and hidden features.

Privacy
Privacy is one of the key differentiators of Facebook from other social networking services. Facebook gives you the option to control what others see, right down to individual photo albums, or various pieces of personal information like your address, phone number, and screen name on instant messaging services.

To control, and limit the flow of information to others -- including your friends -- Facebook has set up some simple controls to adjust privacy. When setting up your profile, you might have noticed some little blue locks under your contact information. You can adjust each one of these to be visible to everyone, just your friends, or no one at all.

Those little blue locks are just the tip of the iceberg. To dig a little deeper, beyond just contact information, click the privacy link on the top right of Facebook. This will take you to a control panel that lets you manage various elements of your profile, including: what users see when searching for you, what actions Facebook reports to others, and which people get limited, or no access to your profile. While you can go in to change any of these, the two most important ones that are worth tweaking are the profile settings (what parts of your profile people can see), and your news feed and mini-feed, which is a running ticker of your activity on the service. Some people are more than happy to let everyone know what they're doing, but if you don't feel like sharing this information with people, it's worth taking a minute to tweak.

As far as what you should share with everyone, it's whatever you're comfortable with. We'd obviously recommend keeping your home address off, along with telephone numbers. Your best bet is to provide your real e-mail address, and limit it to friends only. If you do make your e-mail publicly available, try to use a secondary account, or one you use for spam.

Saying hello
Once you've got your profile set up and you've linked with several friends, there are a handful of ways to communicate with others. The first is the wall, which is the de facto place to leave a note on everyone's profile page. It's completely public, so whatever you write, others will be able to see. As of last week, you're now able to leave attachments on people's walls, including photos, videos, and all sorts of rich media items that have been integrated with Facebook applications, which we'll be getting into later on.

Facebook also has its own e-mail service. One thing that makes this internal messaging service attractive is its conversation threading, which shows each message sent back and forth. It's a great way to keep track of who said what, similar to what you get with Gmail. Just like Gmail, you can just begin typing in a friend's name, or pick the "send FRIEND a message" from the list of commands under their profile picture. This will open up the message composition page where you can write to your heart's content, and add various attachments, similar to what you're able to do on their walls. All of this can be managed under the inbox tab, which you'll find on the top middle of the page.

(Left) Writing on people's walls is a public affair. People can see what you wrote, and visa versa. (Right) Facebook's internal messaging service feels a bit like e-mail.

Poking
Newcomers to Facebook might be a little alarmed at the poking system, but don't be scared. The poke is a subtle, wordless way of saying hello to someone you know -- or, in some cases, don't know. To poke anyone just pick the "Poke him/her" option on the list of actions below their profile picture. Your poke will show up in their notifications box when they log back in, and they'll have the option to poke you back, or ignore it.

Poking is ultimately useless, although many would agree it's one of the small charms and reminders that differentiates Facebook from other social networks.

Sharing is caring
Social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Digg are a cool way to share stories or bits of Web content you've found. Likewise, Facebook has its own sharing system built-in. You can post items to your profile, or send them to your friends on and off the service. Anyone you've shared it with can leave comments and discuss it with others.

There are two easy ways to share links on Facebook. One is to copy and paste a link in to your sharing page. The other is to add the "share on Facebook" bookmarklet to your browsers bookmarks bar. If you intend on sharing things on a regular basis, we'd recommend adding the bookmarklet, as it gives you a one-click option to share something and continue browsing. Either way, once you've fed in a URL, it will scrape the page to grab any related pictures and a brief description. You can also go in and add your own text, which will show up right underneath it. Once you're done tweaking it to your liking, you have the option to post it to your profile, or send it to others on or off Facebook.

Apps/f8 platform
One of the biggest draws to Facebook came earlier this year with the launch of f8, a platform for developers to make their own applications that integrate tightly with Facebook. Your friends can see what apps you're using and vice versa, taking some of the effort out of finding what's cool and what's not. Applications reside mostly on your profile, for others to see. Many apps are like little Web sites that run right inside the service.

To find applications, there's a built-in directory on Facebook. This directory shows the newest, and most popular apps, along with a counter of how many people are using them. Once you've found one you like, you can simply add it to your profile. There's no software installation required, you're simply telling Facebook you want access to it. Likewise, if you find one of your friends using an app, you can click the link to its name to find out more about it.

A listing of all yours apps resides on the farthermost left side of the page. To manage them, just click the "edit" button next to the applications link on top of the list. Here you can rearrange which apps make your short list (the small group of seven or less apps that resides on the left), edit various application settings, and get rid of ones you don't want anymore.

Apps can be useful, but a word to the wise: get rid of the ones you don't use anymore, and keep it clean. One of the things that makes Facebook so attractive are its simplified profiles that don't distract, or bombard you with visual overload. While personal style is an important part of social networking, adding too many apps to your profile can render things distracting to friends, who simply won't bother visiting your profile page.

Social timeline
You may have noticed that every time you add a new friend on Facebook, you have the option to give a small amount of detail about how you know them. Many of these options include things like when you had a job together, if you went to school at a certain time, etc. All of this information is made available in your social timeline, which can be found under Friends > Social Timeline. Assuming you've got some friends, and bothered to fill out this information, you'll be able to keep track of all sorts of life events.

Facebook toolbar
You've mastered profiles, messaging, poking, and more. In fact, you're doing it so regularly you'd like to add it to your browser to skip a few steps. Lucky for you there's a toolbar you can install in your browser which gives you a handy Facebook search bar, a notifier for when you get new message, or friends change things on their profile. There's also an integrated share button to post whatever you're looking at, similar to the bookmarklet mentioned earlier.

Facebook Photo Album Downloader
Facebook lets you upload and share your photos with others. The only hitch is that you can't grab the photos easily -- you have to right click and save them one at a time. This Firefox extension will pull down an entire album for you. One installed, just right click on the link to an album, and it will fetch all the pictures and download them to your desktop.

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto
Got photos you want to upload to Facebook, but don't feel like logging in, and dealing with the Web uploader? If you're a Mac user who uses iPhoto, installing this plug-in will let you upload single shots, or entire albums to Facebook without having to fire up your browser.

Facebook events to Google Calendar
Facebook's built-in events feature is a neat way to create and keep track of upcoming social events. If you're a Google Calendar user, you don't have to rely on yet another calendar with this script for Greasemonkey, a popular Firefox add-on. Facebook events to Google Calendar does just what it says, by giving you a new option next to a Facebook event that lets you send a copy straight to your Google Calendar.

Facebook Widget for Mac OS X
This widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard gives you almost real-time user data from happenings all over Facebook. You can keep track of wall posts, your inbox, friends requests, and pokes. Since it's Dashboard, you can open it up and get rid of it at a moment's notice.