Facebook For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 6

Finding Facebook Friends

In This Chapter

• Understanding what friending someone means
• Finding friends on Facebook in various ways
• Organizing and controlling your Friend List(s)

Hundreds of sayings abound about friendship and friends, and most of them can be boiled down into one catch-all adage: friends, good; no friends, bad. This is true in life and 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 that's what privacy settings are for). So, if you don't have friends who are seeing your posts, what's the point in sharing them? 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, the bulk of friendships are reciprocal, which means if you add someone as a friend, he has to confirm the friendship before it appears on both Timelines. If someone adds you as a friend, you can choose between Confirm and Not Now. If you confirm the friend, Congrats! You have a new friend! And if you ignore ...