A Guide to Facebook

By Anna.English.Teacher.2010

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What is Facebook and why should
you use it?
 Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect with
friends, co-workers, and others who share similar interests or who
have common backgrounds.
 Many use it as a way to stay in touch after finishing school, or as a
way to share their life publicly.
 What makes Facebook different from other social networks are its
extensive privacy controls, its development platform, and its large
and quickly growing user base. Facebook has been called the
"thinking person's" social network. Compared to many other social
networks, Facebook gets new features and improvements on a
regular basis.
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 Setup
 Facebook, like other social networks, is all about getting in touch
with others.
 Luckily for novice users, Facebook has created some simple ways to
find your friends using your e-mail address, or the buddy list from
your AOL instant messaging account.
 You can also search by name, or pull up listings based on your
computer's address book.
 To get started adding friends to Facebook (many of who may already
be on the system), I recommend a multipronged attack.
 Use your most active Web mail account (Hotmail, as one example),
and your AIM buddy list, which in some cases could pull up nearly
everyone you know.
 Since everyone needs an e-mail address to sign up with Facebook,
giving Facebook permission to use your existing address books
should make it possible to track down everyone with whom you
communicate.
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 Set Up
 Once you've added the people you know or remember (you can
always add or delete them later on), one of your first steps should
be filling out your own profile.
 You're welcome to do this before tracking down your friends, but
you'll find that people are almost always constantly making
tweaks to their profile, so nothing is set in stone.
 The two main things that are important here are a personal picture,
and your contact information--both of which Facebook highlights
when you're setting things up.
 For profile pictures, it can be anything you'd like, and you can simply
upload an image to the service from your hard drive. Filling out
the rest of your profile is as simple as completing any Web form.
 You're not required to include anything about yourself, so don't feel
too inclined to fill out information you don't want others to see;
which brings us to the topic of privacy, which you can read more
about after the break...

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 Privacy
 Privacy is one of the key differentiators of Facebook from other social networking
services.
 Facebook gives you the option to control what others see, right down to individual
photo albums, or various pieces of personal information such as your address,
phone number, and screen name on instant messaging services.
 To control or limit the flow of information to others--including your friends--
Facebook has set up some simple controls to adjust privacy.
 When setting up your profile, you might have noticed some little blue locks under
your contact information.
 You can adjust each one of these for the information to be visible to everyone, just
your friends, or no one at all.
 Those little blue locks are just the tip of the iceberg. To dig deeper, beyond just
contact information, click the privacy link on the top right of Facebook. This will
take you to a control panel that lets you manage various elements of your
profile, including: what users see when searching for you; what actions
Facebook reports to others; and which people get limited, or no access to your
profile.
 While you can go in to change any of these, the two most important ones that are
worth tweaking are the profile settings (what parts of your profile people can
see), and your news feed and mini-feed, which is a running ticker of your
activity on the service.
 Some people are more than happy to let everyone know what they're doing, but if
you don't feel like sharing this information with people, it's worth taking a
minute to tweak.
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 Saying hello
 Once you've got your profile set up and you've linked with several friends,
there are a handful of ways to communicate with others.
 The first is the Wall, which is the de facto place to leave a note on everyone's
profile page. It's completely public, so whatever you write, others will be
able to see.
 As of last week, you're now able to leave attachments on people's Walls,
including photos, videos, and all sorts of rich media items that have been
integrated with Facebook applications, which we'll be getting into later on.
  Facebook also has its own e-mail service.
 One thing that makes this internal messaging service attractive is its
conversation threading, which shows each message sent back and forth.
It's a great way to keep track of who said what, similar to what you get
with Gmail. Just like Gmail, you can just begin typing in a friend's name, or
pick the "send FRIEND a message" from the list of commands under their
profile picture.
 This will open up the message composition page, where you can write to your
heart's content and add various attachments, similar to what you're able
to do on their Walls.
 All of this can be managed under the In-box tab, which you'll find on the top
middle of the page.
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 Poking
 Newcomers to Facebook might be a little alarmed at the poking system, but don't be
scared.
 The poke is a subtle, wordless way of saying hello to someone you know--or, in some
cases, don't know.
 To poke anyone just pick the "Poke him/her" option on the list of actions below their
profile picture.
 Your poke will show up in their notifications box when they log back in, and they'll have
the option to poke you back, or ignore it.
 Poking is ultimately useless, although many would agree it's one of the small charms
and reminders that differentiate
 Sharing is caring
 Social bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us and Digg are a cool way to share
stories or bits of Web content you've found.
 Likewise, Facebook has its own sharing system built in. You can post items to your
profile or send them to your friends on and off the service. Anyone you've shared
items with can then leave comments and discuss the item with others.
 There are two easy ways to share links on Facebook. One is to copy and paste a link to
your sharing page. The other is to add the "share on Facebook" bookmarklet to
your browser's bookmarks bar. If you intend on sharing things on a regular basis, I'd
recommend adding the bookmarklet, as it gives you a one-click option to share
something and continue browsing. Either way, once you've fed in a URL, it will scrape
the page to grab any related pictures and a brief description. You can also go in and
add your own text, which will show up right underneath it. Once you're done
tweaking it to your liking, you have the option to post it to your profile, or send it to
others on or off Facebook.
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 Facebook toolbar 
 You've already mastered profiles, messaging, poking, and more.
 In fact, you're doing it so regularly you'd like to add the service to
your browser to skip a few steps.
 Lucky for you, there's a toolbar you can install in your browser which
gives you a handy Facebook search bar and a notifier for when
you get new message or when friends change items on their
profile.
 There's also an integrated share button to post whatever you're
looking at, similar to the bookmarklet mentioned earlier.
Facebook Photo Album Downloader 
Facebook lets you upload and share your photos with others.
 The only hitch is that you can't grab photos easily--you have to right
click and then save them one at a time. This Firefox extension will
pull down an entire album for you. One installed, just right click on
the link to an album, and it will fetch all the pictures and download
them to your desktop.

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 Groups and Events
 You’ll find a lot of random groups on Facebook and you should join any that are of
interest to you.
 However, be sure to occasionally prune your groups list. What you thought was cool a
month ago may not be now.
 Additionally, if you’re going to start a group, make sure one doesn’t already exist for the
same damn topic please. Be original or bow down to the person who thought of it
first.
 Events:
 This is likely one of the coolest features. Parties, dinners… whatever, you can
create an event, invite who you want, make it public or make it private.
 Under the My Events tab, you can also view past events as well as friend’s
public events. This way, if you weren’t one of the kids cool enough to get
invited personally, you can barge your way into some free beer at the
nearest public events.
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 Groups and Events
 You’ll find a lot of random groups on Facebook and you should join any that are of
interest to you.
 However, be sure to occasionally prune your groups list. What you thought was cool a
month ago may not be now.
 Additionally, if you’re going to start a group, make sure one doesn’t already exist for the
same damn topic please. Be original or bow down to the person who thought of it
first.
 Events:
 This is likely one of the coolest features. Parties, dinners… whatever, you can
create an event, invite who you want, make it public or make it private.
 Under the My Events tab, you can also view past events as well as friend’s
public events. This way, if you weren’t one of the kids cool enough to get
invited personally, you can barge your way into some free beer at the
nearest public events.


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 Contacting Anna-English-
Teacher
I offer reasonable priced Private English Lessons via Skype .
Please feel free to contact me to arrange for a free trial lesson.
Please visit http://anna-english-teacher.webs.com and fill in the form.
You can also contact me via
 anna.english.teacher.2010@gmail.com


 anna-english-teacher


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