This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Finding Friends via Email
If you recall, when you first signed up for your Facebook account, Facebook asked to look through your email contacts list for potential friends. You might have done this or you might not have; I typically ignore this step when I’m first getting started. In any case, there’s a lot more looking that can be done, at any time you feel like it.
Even though today’s high school and college generations seem to have abandoned email as being too slow and old fashioned (Email? Old fashioned already?), we oldsters still rely on email as a primary means of communicating online—especially for work and with family members. As such, it’s a fair assumption that if you email someone on a regular basis, you might want to become Facebook friends with him.
To that end, Facebook can look through your email contact lists for people who are also Facebook members, and then invite those people to be your friends. Here’s how it works:
- If you have a Find Friends button in your Facebook toolbar, click it. Otherwise, click the Friend Requests button, and select the Find Friends link in the drop-down menu.
- When the Friends Step 1 page appears, as shown in Figure 4.4, select the email service you use.
Figure 4.4. Finding friends via email.
- If you use a web-based email service, such as Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, enter your email address and click the Find Friends button. (If prompted, enter your email password, too.) Facebook now displays a list of your email contacts who are also Facebook members.
- If you use Microsoft Outlook to check your email, click Other Tools, and then select Upload Contact File. When the page changes, click the Find My Windows Contacts button and follow the onscreen instructions to proceed.
- If you use another software program to manage your email, follow the same instructions in Step 4, except click the Browse or Choose File button; then navigate to and select your email contacts file. When you return to the Friends page, click the Upload Contacts button to upload your email contacts list to Facebook and display a list of email contacts who are also Facebook members.
- When the list of email contacts appears, as shown in Figure 4.5, check the box next to each person to whom you’d like to be friends.
Figure 4.5. Identifying people you’d like to be friends with.
- Click the Send Invites button to send friend requests to these contacts.
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Facebook now sends friend requests to the people you selected. When a person accepts your request, you become friends with that person. If a person does not accept your request, you don’t become friends.