Facebook® for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Finding Facebook Friends

In This Chapter

• Understanding what friending someone means

• Finding friends on Facebook in various ways

• Organizing and controlling your Friend List

Hundreds of sayings abound about friendship and friends. We looked up a bunch of them online, and we boiled them down into one catch-all adage: Friends, good; no friends, bad. This is true in life, and it's also true on Facebook. Without your friends on Facebook, you find yourself at some point looking at a blank screen and asking, "Okay, now what?" With friends, you find yourself at some point looking at photos of a high school reunion and asking, "Oh, dear. How did that last hour go by so quickly?"

Most of Facebook's functionality is built around the premise that you have a certain amount of information that you want your friends to see (and maybe some information that you don't want all your friends to see, but we get to that later). So, if you don't have friends that are seeing your Profile, what's the point in creating one? Messages aren't that useful unless you send them to someone. Photos are made to be viewed, but if the access is limited to friends, well, you need to find some friends.

On Facebook, all friendships are reciprocal, which means if you add someone as a friend, they have to confirm the friendship before it appears on both Profiles. If someone adds you as a friend, you can choose between Confirm and Ignore. If you confirm the friend, congrats: You have a new friend! And if you ignore the ...