This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Friends Tab
The Friends tab is all about managing your friends. How do you acquire friends on Facebook?
Searching for Friends
You do a search. Just enter the name of someone you're searching for in the Search box in the upper left, and press Enter. A list of matches to your search appears, as shown in Figure 1.21.
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Figure 1.21 Searching for potential friends.
Note the Add to Friends link next to the first match. Clicking that link opens the page shown in Figure 1.22, which allows you to add a personal greeting to your prospective friend.
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Figure 1.22 Adding a friend.
Facebook also displays a graphic with two words in it that you're supposed to enter, as shown in Figure 1.22. You'll see this every time you want to send a message; it's a spam-avoidance measure. (If you're thinking of spamming Facebook messages on behalf of a business, you should rethink.) Clicking the Add Friend button sends this message to your prospective friend by email, and a link if he agrees to add you as a friend. After this person adds you, he appears in your collection of friends.
Managing Your Friends
To manage your friends, click the Friends tab, opening the page shown in Figure 1.23.
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Figure 1.23 Managing your friends.
Want to leave a message on somebody's Wall? Just click her image, and you'll go to her profile.
By default, all your friends are displayed, but you can look at various subsets. Clicking the down arrow on the Friends tab displays the menu shown in Figure 1.24.
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Figure 1.24 The Friends tab's menu.
The items are as follows:
- Status Updates: Shows friends with updated status lines.
- Online Now: Shows your friends who are online now.
- Recently Updated: Shows which of your friends have recently updated their profiles.
- Recently Added: Shows your most recently added friends.
- All Friends: Shows all your friends (the default).
- Invite Friends: Allows you to email friends who aren't already on Facebook to invite them to join.
- Find Friends: Opens a page that has various ways of searching for prospective friends.
For example, selecting the Online Now item opens the page shown in Figure 1.25, listing which of my friends are online right now.
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Figure 1.25 Which of my friends are online now.
Creating Friend Lists
You can also organize your friends into lists, which is convenient when you want to email a bunch of friends at once. You can have up to 1,500 friends in a list, which is good for getting the word out.
To create a friends list, click the Make a New List button on the right of the Friends tab. Enter the name of the new list, as shown in Figure 1.26 (in this case, that's Ithaca List).
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Figure 1.26 Creating a new friend list.
The next step is to add the friends you want in the new list, as shown in Figure 1.27. Here you type the names of the friends you want to add—or you can select multiple friends at once using the Select Multiple Friends link.
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Figure 1.27 Selecting friends.
As you add new friends to the list, they appear on the page, as shown in Figure 1.28.
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Figure 1.28 Adding friends.
Later you can manage the list using the "Manage this list" and "Delete this list" links you see near the bottom of Figure 1.28.
That introduces as much as you need to know about friends and managing friends for the chapters to come.
Next up: the Inbox tab.