How do I invite someone (a friend) to join Facebook?

I don't think it's anything to do with you being in the current generation, a previous generation or even the generation before that. The reality of living in a Facebook world is that things constantly change and that the only constant is that there are more changes coming just around the corner.

Fortunately, I don't mind digging around and trying to figure things out, and that's just what I had to do this time because the old way of clicking on the "Friends" menu to find the "Invite Friends" link is long gone. If their email address is registered, you see a sort of phantom profile (depending on their privacy settings) but if they're not yet part of Facebook, well, then you need to come somewhere like here to get the Invite a Friend to Join Facebook link, because it's incredibly hard to find on the new interface.

To start out, I'm going to search for a specific email address to see what happens:

Interesting. Looks like that's a known email address to Facebook, and it's associated it with my account, but the privacy settings are such that it shows almost nothing. Still, okay, let's see what's revealed:

Not much data to go on, but I just happen to know that the email address works, so I'll click on the "add him as a friend" text link. The result:

Okay, so I can apparently send myself a friend request. A bit confusing, but it's a good demonstration so I'll proceed. In this as in all other cases of sending an invitation, I strongly encourage you to add a personal message. In this case, I'll click on the ingeniously labeled "Add a personal message..." and a small box appears:

At this point if I make a comment about sharing a glass of wine or breakfast, well, it's a bit oddly self-referential. Ready with your own personal message on the invitation? Click on "Send request".

But what if you enter the email address and it's unknown to the system? If that's the case, you can't get to the page that lets you invite them to join Facebook (I have no idea why, it's a logical place to have the link). You can have Facebook scan your address book or even upload a list of contacts, but that's vast overkill and it's weird that there's no option to simply enter a single email address.

Instead, you just need to know the URL because I sure can't find anywhere on the site where it's still linked:

    Invite a Friend to Join Facebook.

Click on that link and you'll have an invite page:

If they're known to Facebook and have a profile, they'll get an email like this:

Otherwise they get the same old "You should join Facebook, click here" message that's been generated by the site since it had just a few thousand users...

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