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Facebook has more than 750 million active users who, on average, share more than 30 billion pieces of content per month. What does that mean? It means it's a great way to figure out what your middle school ex is doing now or hear about the exploits of your college friends' kids. Because your friends post news and other tidbits they find around the Web, Facebook is also a great filter for the approximately 500 billion gigabytes of information floating around the Internet. In short, Facebook is fun -- and useful -- because so many people and so much information are there. And in a few short steps, you can be, too. Your first step, of course, will be creating your profile. After that, you can start searching around for your friends. Once you're set up, you can start updating your status regularly, posting on friends' wall, sharing information, and uploading and viewing photos and videos. Read on to get started by creating your personalized Facebook profile.
The only thing you'll need in addition to a birthday, a name and a gender is an e-mail address. After typing words to show you're human (as directed), Facebook will ask if you'd like to find your friends. It's a good idea to do this now, but don't worry -- you can always come back to this step later. Follow the prompts to allow Facebook to scour your e-mail service for people you've e-mailed who are also on Facebook. Click the boxes next to the ones you'd like to add. Here's a philosophical point: Now's a good time to decide if you're going to "friend" people from work. In general, the more detailed your profile, the easier it'll be for you to find people and for people to find you. It's worth taking your time when entering your high school, college and employer information (as prompted). Then, again as prompted, include a photo of yourself, either by clicking the button to upload a photo that already exists on your computer, or by automatically taking a shot with your computer's built-in or connected webcam.
In general, people tend to use informal pictures that do a good job of showing their face, but your profile picture can be anything under the sun -- as long as it's rated PG-13 or below. Now it's time to surf through your profile, adding whatever information you think is fun (click the pencil-shaped "edit profile" icon on the upper right). In this and in everything on Facebook, most people enjoy letting their personalities show. As you explore the various slots where you can add profile information -- for example, "philosophy," "activities and interests" and "sports" -- consider taking the time to be honest and precise. Eventually, your Facebook profile will be as unique as you are. The final step before Facebook allows you to start sharing content is confirming your registration through your e-mail account. Voila! You're fully operational, or at least ready to start surfing around Facebook's many features. Next, we'll look a little more closely at how to find your friends.
Luckily, the general rule of this culture is to be yourself. You can update your status with interesting observations, recent happenings in your life, strange non-sequiturs, funny quips, thoughts about life in general, song lyrics or movie lines, information about your kids or pets, or anything else under the sun. And for your first post, consider writing something about being new to Facebook. You might be surprised by how many responses you get! Now that you've added all your friends, you might want to scroll down through your news feed (click "home" or "news feed") and see what kinds of status updates they've been posting. This is a great way to see what friends and family members are up to. Did a friend get a new job? Is someone trying to put together a movie night with friends? Is your neighbor cooking a fabulous-sounding dinner? Click the "home" or "news feed" tab on your Facebook profile. Then, in the top-middle of your page, type your status update into the bar that asks, "What's on your mind?" When you hit "share," your status update will post to your wall, and it'll show up in your friends' news feeds.
Want to post a message on a friend's page or repost an interesting news story? We'll look more closely at that in the next section. Did you come across an interesting article or a funny quote, or did you love a beautiful picture that your friend posted? You can use Facebook to broadcast or rebroadcast this content to your friends. Notice that under your friends' status updates there are only the options to "comment" or "like" it, whereas under other content posted to Facebook, including news, photos or video, the option exists to "share" this content. If you're inspired by your friends' news or content, click the "share" button, head it with a quick comment, and click the button to post it to your own wall. The quickest way to share content you found elsewhere is to copy and paste the link into the "What's on your mind?" bar. Notice that once you paste the link, Facebook automatically displays your content as a link, likely with a couple options for pictures to accompany it.
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