How do I send a friend request in Facebook? (updated)

Ah, the fun of writing against a ceaselessly moving interface target like Facebook. Yeah, you're right, a number of articles here on Ask Dave Taylor are indeed obsoleted by the new interface, but my experience is that if you poke around just a wee bit you'll find that you can figure out a solution.

This is a good case in point. While there's no "friends" menu, there are still a bunch of ways you can try and find your friend, whether you just know their name or name and email address.

First off, ya know those subtle icons near the "Facebook" logo on the top of the window?

That first one, the two tiny heads? That's your newly improved Friends / Friend Requests menu. Click on it:

Because I have no pending friend requests, it's pretty short, but "Find Your Friends" is a pretty likely path to travel, yes? :-)

You have to read that section closely, but what it wants to do is scan your address book on a popular email service you use and see which of your contacts are also on Facebook. Personally, I don't really want Facebook knowing who I email on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, so I'd never do this. Your experience may vary.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page and you'll have yet more options to find your friend:

I don't use IM frequently enough to have Facebook scan it to figure out who should be my FB friends too, so instead, I'll type in the name of a friend I want to connect with on Facebook, a marketing pro and friend of mine, Greg Lynott:

There he is! That was easy:

Now, let's back up and try the same with the email address I use to communicate with him (blurred to protect his privacy):

The search doesn't match his email address (Greg, you need to register all your common email addresses with Facebook so this won't happen next time!) so I instead see an invite form:

I'm guessing this is the form you were looking for in the first place. Now that you know how to find it, fill it out -- and always include a personalized message for best results! -- and click on "Invite".

Done. Now, that wasn't too hard, was it? :-)