With over 400 million users, you're obviously not the first person to succumb to peer pressure -- or curiosity -- and sign up to join the busy Facebook community!
I've been plugged in for years, but it's only in the last year or so that I started to find it interesting and fun. Prior to that, it was basically the same people who I interact with in other forums and mailing lists, so there wasn't much news. Now I keep in touch with dozens of friends who otherwise are far beyond my usual circles.
It's actually pretty easy to sign up, but if you want to do it right, allocate enough time to fill in at least some of the basics.
To start, go to http://www.facebook.com/ and you'll see right on the home page:
Fill this in and click on "Sign Up". You'll be asked to verify that you're not a robot (really! it's a measure to prevent spammers infecting Facebook with bogus accounts):
Enter the two words you see -- in this case "view" and "doorways" -- and click on "Sign Up" again on this page.
You're in! You have an account set up on Facebook. You're not done, however. First up, it'll suggest some friends you might connect with:
I have no idea who these two people are, so perhaps they're special potential friends to everyone who joins Facebook, I dunno. :-)
Since Facebook isn't much fun without friends being online and connected with you, the system tries all sorts of ways for you to identify your potential friends. Next up is its ability to scan your address book:
If you'd rather not have Facebook scan your mailbox and figure out your correspondences, no worries, just click on "Skip this step".
Next attempt to match you: enter your high school, place of work, or some other sort of identifying information:
Still want to stay relatively anonymous? Click on "Skip"!
Next step is to set up a profile picture for yourself, something I highly recommend:
Click "Save & Continue" and you're set and will be dropped onto your new, relatively austere, Facebook newsfeed page. Along the top it'll remind you that the system has sent an email to confirm your email address, entered in step one:
In your email inbox you should get a message that looks like this:
Click on the link and you'll have confirmed that the email address you entered is legit. Now you're good to go on Facebook and it's time to start sending friend requests and filling in all your personal information so others can find you too.
Have fun! Oh, and don't forget to become a fan of Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook too! :-)
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I was there already