Now that you know that Facebook is a means by which you can connect with people who matter to you, your next question may be, “How?” It’s a good question — such a good question that we spend almost the rest of this book answering it. But first, an overview.
Establish a Profile
When you sign up for Facebook, one of the first things you do is establish your Profile. A Profile on Facebook is a social résumé — a page about you
that you keep up-to-date with all the information you want people to know.
Facebook understands that if you were handing out résumés in the real world, you’d recover photos probably give different documents to different people. Your social résumé may have your phone number, your favorite quotes, and pictures from that crazy night in you-know-where with you-know-who. Your résumé for a potential employer would probably share your education and employment history. Your résumé for your family may include your personal address as well as show off your recent vacation photos and news about your life’s changes.
You show different slices of your life and personality to different people, and a Facebook Profile, shown in Figure 1-1, allows you (no, encourages you) to do the same. To this end, your Profile is set up with all kinds of data recovery program privacy controls to specify who you want to see which information. Many people find great value in adding to their Profile just about every piece of information they can and then unveiling each particular piece cautiously. The safest rule here is to share on your Profile any piece of information you’d share with someone in real life. The corollary applies, too: Don’t share on your Profile any information that you wouldn’t share with someone in real life. We provide more detail about the Profile in Chapter 2. For now, think of it like a personal Web page with privacy controls for particular pieces of information. This page accurately reflects you so that you hand the right social résumé to the right person.
The motivations for establishing a Profile on Facebook recover photos from Mac are twofold. First, a Profile helps the people who know you in real life find and connect with you
on Facebook. Each individual is actively (or actively trying) to keep track of the people she knows. If your name is something relatively common, such as
James Brown or Maria Gonzales, it’s difficult for people to find you without additional identifiers. Information about you, such as your home town, your education history, or your photos, help people find the right James or Maria.
The second (and way cooler) reason to establish an accurate Profile is the work it saves you. Keeping your Profile detailed and relevant means that your friends and family can always get the latest information about where you live, who you know, and what you’re up to. You no longer have to read your phone number to someone while he fumbles to find a pen. Just tell him, “It’s on Facebook.” If a cousin wants to send you a birthday present, he doesn’t have to ruin the surprise by asking you for your address. When your Profile is up to date, conversations that used to start with the open-ended, “How have you been?” can skip straight to the good stuff: “I saw your pictures from Hawaii last week. Please tell me how you ended up wearing those coconuts.”
Connect with friends
After you join Facebook, start seeing its value by tracking down some people you know. Facebook offers the following tools to help you:
✓ Facebook Friend Finder: Allows you to scan the e-mail addresses in your e-mail address book to find whether those people are already on Facebook. Selectively choose among those with whom you’d like to connect.
✓ Suggestions: Will show you the names and pictures of people you likely know or celebrities whose news you’d like to follow. These people are
selected for you based on various signals like where you live or work, or how many friends you have in common.
✓ Search: Helps you to find people whom you expect are already using Facebook.
After you establish a few connections, use those connections to find other people you know by searching through their connections for familiar names.
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