How to Find Old Friends—and Make New Ones

Dec 28, 2011

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Facebook for Grown-Ups: Use Facebook to Reconnect with Old Friends, Family, and Co-Workers, 2nd Edition

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Finding Friends of Friends

Another way to find old friends is to look for people who are friends of your current friends. That is, when you make someone your friend on Facebook, you can browse through the list of people who are on his friends list. Chances are you find mutual friends on this list—people that both of you know, but you haven’t found otherwise.

You find friends of your friends on your friends’ Profile pages. Look for the box labeled Friends near the top of the page; these are the people on this person’s friends list. Click the box to view all these people.

Click on any name in this list to view that person’s profile page. To send a friend request to a person, click the Add Friend button. You’d be surprised how many old friends you can turn up this way!

Finding Hard-to-Find Friends

When it comes to tracking down old friends on Facebook, sometimes a little detective work is in order. It’s especially tough to find women you used to know, as names get changed along with marital status. Some women have enough forethought to enter their maiden name as their middle name on Facebook—so the Cathy Coolidge you used to know might be listed as Cathy Coolidge Smith—which means their maiden names actually show up in a Facebook search. Others, however, don’t do this—and thus become harder to find.

You can, of course, search for a partial name—searching just for “Cathy,” for example. What happens next is a little interesting. Facebook returns a list of people named Cathy, of course, but puts at the top of this list people who have mutual friends in common with you. That’s a nice touch, as it’s likely that your old friend has already made a connection with another one of your Facebook friends.

Past that point, you can then display everyone on Facebook with that single name. But that’s going to be a bit unwieldy, unless your friend has a unique name.

One approach to narrowing down the results is to specify a location in your search. For example, if you’re looking for a John Smith and think he currently lives in Minnesota, you would search for “john smith minnesota.” It’s even better if you think you know a city; searching for “john smith minneapolis” narrows the results even further.

Other information added to your query can also help you better find people. For example, if you know where that person works, add the name of the company to the query. So if you think John Smith works at IBM, search for “john smith ibm.”

Beyond these tips, finding long-lost friends on Facebook is a trial-and-error process. The best advice is to keep plugging—if they’re on Facebook, you’ll find them sooner or later.

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