Newbie's guide to Facebook

Back in 2007, when this feature was first published, Facebook was still a relatively new phenomenon. However, in the intervening years, the website has seen many updates and interface tweaks. And in the 12-month period between February 2009 and February 2010, Facebook's user base exploded from 150 million to 400 million worldwide. We figured it was high time we gave this guide a makeover. So welcome to Facebook for newbies redux — here are some tips to help you get started.

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, worldwide. Many use it as a way to stay in touch after finishing school and to keep up with long-distance family and friends. It's a way to share your life either publicly or a select group of friends.

What makes Facebook different from other social networks is its privacy controls, development platform, and its large and still-growing user base. It offers many ways to connect and communicate with people, from instant chat through to public fan boards. Compared to many other social networks, Facebook gets new features and improvements on a regular basis.

Set-up

Facebook, like other social networks, is all about connecting with others. Luckily for novice users, Facebook has created some simple ways to find your friends using just your email contacts or your friends lists from Windows Live Messenger. You can also search for friends by name, school or company.

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), which in some cases could pull up nearly everyone you know. Since everyone needs an email 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 more 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 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. Facebook will use the full image as your portrait on your profile page, and you can select a thumbnail area that will appear as your user icon by clicking the "Change photo" option that appears when you mouse over the portrait on the profile page. From there, simply mouse down to "Edit thumbnail", and you can drag the image to your liking.

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 obligated to fill out information you don't want others to see … which brings us to the topic of privacy.

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, email address 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 little grey padlock symbols next to each field for your contact information. You can click these individually to select from a drop-down menu whether each detail will be visible to everyone, just your friends or no one at all. You can even make a custom list, selecting which friends will or will not be able to view your contact information.

Those little locks are just the tip of the iceberg. To dig a little deeper, beyond just contact information, click the Account menu on the top right of Facebook. This will take you to a drop-down menu with a "Privacy Settings" option. The Profile Information option on this panel lets you manage the privacy for 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 posts, posts by friends and News 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 email address and limit it to friends only. If you do make your email 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 News Feed, which is the de facto place to leave a note that will appear on your friends' own News Feeds. You can also leave photos, videos, events and links on the News Feed by clicking on the little icons that appear when you click on the text box to leave a message.

Facebook also has its own email 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 picture on their profile page. 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 "Messages" icon, the middle of the three dark blue icons at the top left next to the Facebook logo.

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 people you know. To poke someone, just pick the "Poke him/her" option on the list of actions below their profile picture. Your poke will show up in the column to the right of their news feed 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 differentiate Facebook from other social networks.

Sharing is caring

Social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Reddit 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 news feed or wall. The other is to add the "share on Facebook" bookmarklet to your browser's 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. If you click the bookmarklet from a web page, 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 above your attachment. Once you're done tweaking it to your liking, you have the option to post it to your profile or send it in a message.