Carolyn Abram - Facebook For Dummies

Since the invention of the modern-day camera, people have been all too eager to yell, “Cheese!” Photographs can make great tour guides on trips down memory lane — but only if you remember to develop, upload, or scrapbook them. Many memories fade when the smiling faces are stuffed into an old shoe box, remain on undeveloped rolls of film, or are left to molder in obscurity on your phone’s camera roll.

Facebook offers three great incentives for uploading, organizing, and editing your photos and videos:

Facebook provides one easy-to-access location for all your photos and videos. Directing any interested person to your Facebook timeline is easier than emailing pictures individually, sending a complicated link to a photo site, or waiting until the family reunion to show off the my-how-the-kids-have-grown pics. You can share videos alongside your photos, so people can really get a feel for all parts of your vacation.

Every photo and video you upload can be linked to the timelines of the people in the photo or video. For example, suppose you upload pictures of you and your sister and link them to her timeline. On Facebook, this is called tagging someone. Whenever someone visits your sister’s timeline, he sees those pictures; he doesn’t even have to know you. This feature is great because it introduces longevity to photos. As long as people are visiting your sister’s timeline, they can see those pictures. Photo albums no longer have to be something people look at right after the event and maybe again years later. Friends may have certain settings that prevent you from tagging them in photos. In general, people leave this feature turned on, but if you’re trying to tag someone and can’t, this might be why.

Facebook gives you the power to control exactly who has access to your photos and videos. Every time you upload a photo or create a new photo album on Facebook, you can decide whether who you want to see it: everyone on Facebook, just your friends, or a subset of your friends based on your comfort level. You may choose to show your wedding photos to all your friends, but those of the honeymoon to only a few friends. This control enables you to tailor your audience to those friends who might be most interested. All your friends might enjoy your baby photos, but maybe only your co-workers will care about photos from the recent company party.

Chapter 11shows how to share your photos and videos.

The Facebook Events feature is just what it sounds like: a system for creating events, inviting people to them, sending out messages about them, and so on. Your friends and other guests RSVP to events, which allows the event organizers to plan accordingly and allows attendees to receive event reminders. Facebook Events can be used for something as small as a lunch date or as big as a march on Washington, D.C. Sometimes events are abstract rather than physical. For example, someone could create an event for Ride Your Bike to Work Day and hope the invitation spreads far and wide (through friends and friends of friends) to promote awareness. You can use Events to plan barbecues for friends as well as to put together a large reading series. Chapter 13covers Events in detail.

Facebook Groups are also what they sound like: groups of people organized around a common topic or real-world organization. One group may be intimate, such as five best friends who plan several activities together. Another group could be practical — for example, PTA Members of Denver Schools. Within a group, all members can share relevant information, photos, or discussions. Carolyn’s groups include one for each kid’s classroom at school, one for her For Dummies editorial team to update how the writing is going, one for women who like hiking and camping in the Pacific Northwest, and one Buy Nothing group for passing along used items with others in her neighborhood. Groups are covered in detail in Chapter 10.

Whenever you share content on Facebook, you can choose to share it only with members of a certain group. So if you just had a baby and know how much your family is jonesing for new photos, you can share photos with just your family group without inundating the world at large.

Facebook Photos, Groups, and Events are only a small sampling of how you can use Facebook to connect with the people you know. Throughout this book, you find information about how Facebook interacts with the greater Internet. You might see articles recommended by friends when you go to The New York Times website or information about what music your friends like when you use Spotify, an Internet radio website. Chapter 15explains in detail the games, apps, and websites that you can use with your Facebook information.

Many of these websites and applications have been built by outside developers who don’t work for Facebook. They include tools to help you edit your photos; create slideshows; play games with friends across the globe; divvy up bills among people who live or hang out together; and exchange information about good movies, music, books, and restaurants. After you become a little more comfortable with the Facebook basics, you can try some of the thousands of applications and websites whose services allow you to interact with your Facebook friends.

Every day, you interact with your friends and family. You also interact with other people, places and things: a newspaper or magazine, your favorite coffee shop, a celebrity whose marriage travails you can’t help but be fascinated by, a television show that has you on the edge of your seat, or a cause that’s near and dear to your heart. All these entities can be represented on Facebook through Pages (with a capital P). These Pages look almost exactly like timelines, just for the not-quite-people among us. Instead of becoming friends with Pages, you can like (or follow) them. So when you like a television show (say, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah ), you’ll start to see updates from that Page (The Daily Show) in your News Feed. Liking Pages for businesses or causes helps you stay up-to-date with news from them. Chapter 14covers the ins and outs of Pages.

One of the things people often do in the world is try to figure out a way to make it better. Every day, people are working on solving lots of hard problems. Facebook fits into this because it can help you spread the word to friends about the causes you're passionate about. And if your friends care about the same things, they in turn might bring along their friends to create a large group of people willing to help out. In addition to simply passing along information, you can create fundraisers where your friends help you reach a charitable goal. Fundraisers are covered in Chapter 12.

In ye olden days, say, the early 2000s, most college freshmen would receive a thinly bound book containing the names and faces of everyone in their matriculating class. These face books were useful for matching names to the students seen around campus or for pointing out particular people to friends. However, these face books had several problems. If someone didn’t send in his picture, the books were incomplete. They were outdated by junior year because many people looked drastically different, and the books didn’t reflect the students who had transferred in or who were from any other class. Finally, they had little information about each person.

In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore at Harvard, launched an online “book” to which people could upload their photos and personal information, a service that solved many of these problems. Within a month, more than half of the Harvard undergraduates had signed up.