Facebook: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Joining a Network

What Facebook does best is track connections between people who’ve joined the site. The easiest way to make a bunch of Facebook connections in one fell swoop is to join a network—a group of people who have something in common: graduates and current attendees of a particular school, fellow employees at a company, residents of a town, and so on. Joining a network takes a lot of the grunt work out of finding interesting real-world groups and events, shopping for local stuff, and contacting real-life friends and co-workers. You can’t just join any ol’ network, though—there are some restrictions, as this chapter explains. And if you want to create a new network, you can suggest it to Facebook. Read on for the full scoop.

How Networks Work

A Facebook network is simply a group of people who live, work, or go to school in the same place. You’ll probably want to join at least one network as soon as you register, because until you do, the only folks whose profiles you can see are those you specifically tell Facebook you want to be friends with (see Chapter 3), and the only events and groups you can see are “global” ones—which is about as exciting as reading through the New York Times want ads when you live in L.A.

Note

You can’t see a network member’s profile until you join that network, but you can see a few public details, such as the member’s profile pictures and friends.

When you join a network, two things happen:

• You get immediate access to the Facebook profiles ...