The Tutorial

Welcome to Thefacebook
The Facebook is self described as "an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges." It began as a project by a team of Harvard undergraduates.

Facebook takes college students and links them to one another via profiles. You invite someone to be your friend (or vice versa), and you begin to build a social network among people whom you to go school with. You might see these people everyday. You might have never met them. You could be mistaking them for someone else. Or you just might think he or she is cute.

Facebook is limited only to the students or alumni of the particular university. Members are only allowed limited searches of other universities.

The Interface
The front of Facebook (housed at http://www.thefacebook.com) is a streamlined and simply designed web space, which may fool those accustomed to overdesigned and ultra-busy sites. The site greets you almost pictureless. This makes it not-so-overwhelming to the not-so-Internet-savvy.

Your Space within Facebook
Your "Home" in Facebook is a page that houses access to your friends, messages you may have waiting for you and other such reminders. From here you can check on your friends, search for new ones, send messages and etc. It's this homebase for navigating through your Facebook space. It also houses your profile, the main feature of The Facebook.

Me, Myself and I
Facebook is a profile-based site, where you sell yourself by telling others who you are. It gives you everything from basic information all the way to who's dating whom. Everything is linkable in ones profile. This is to aid in ...

Finding a Friend
Most people are invited by a close friend to join Facebook. Members can simply type in the e-mail address of a person and an invite will be sent to them saying you invited them to join Facebook.

Once inside, you know you have at least one friend. And once you're friends with someone, you have complete access to his or her profile, along with his or her friends. Chances are, you have at least one other friend in common with the person that invited you. And this is where the "befriending" or being "Facebooked' begins -- as you search through friends of friends to find the people you know. The "befriending" or being "Facebooked" is a simply process in which an e-mail is sent to the person you want to befriend asking them to confirm or deny your friendship.

Commonalities
Sooner or later, however, you've "Facebooked" all the people you know could find but still feel the need to branch out and get even more connected. Facebook allows you to search newly added people, look to see who's in that big lecture class of yours, find people with common interests, find old high school friends, see who's listening to the same music and so forth. The search function is a powerful one with both basic and advanced searches.

And all the while, people are doing the same thing, increasing the chances of someone finding and contemplating whether or not to "Facebook" you.

Soon you have a group of friend that you can actually visualize.

Grouping Each Other
While it may seem like Facebook is just an amped-up online version of an address book or an online yearbook in which you get to choose who's featured, the site offers organizational tools that allow you to structure and maintain your social network in ways that aren't possible elsewhere or in real life.

One can create a group surrounding a specific topic and then invite friends in. (People can also search for these groups). Within these groups, you can e-mail members, post on a bulletin board and peruse the other group members' profiles. This allows you to make different segments within a large friend base.

Facebook also automatically groups you by college course when you tell them what classes you're enrolled in.

Facebook Fun
The Graffiti Wall and Poke features add a little level of light-heartedness to the experience. While allowing users to access friend information offline (via text messaging) adds a serious, more useful tone for belonging to the Facebook.