Facebook’s popularity is skyrocketing, drawing more than 50 million people to this combination online village green, personal Web site creator, and souped-up address book. But one thing you won’t get when signing up is a printed manual. Enter Facebook: The Missing Manual–your witty, authoritative, full-color guide to unlocking everything Facebook can do.
Facebook: The Missing Manual Sneak Preview: Five Tips and Tricks
1. Never check the “Remember me” box when logging onto the site. (Doing so puts your account at unnecessary risk and saves you very little time or effort.)
2. When you register for the site, use your actual birthday so that your friends will get an automatic heads-up a few days before the Big Day (all the better to fete you with).
3. Never add compromising photos or info to your Facebook profile; bosses, teachers, hiring managers, and others can use legitimate means to see your profile *even if* you think you’ve adjusted your privacy settings to prevent them.
4. If you’re on Facebook to find a gig (or a date), be sure to sprinkle keywords liberally in your profile descriptions. Doing so ups the odds of your appearing in other members’ searches.
5. Before you fill out your profile, first head to the main menu and click the “privacy” link (little-p) and follow the steps in Chapter 12 of the book to customize who gets to see how much of your personal information.
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star Too Late to Help
This book was published in January 2008. It may have been helpful in its day, but in Facebook terms this book is about as current as a manual for fixing a black and white television or describing the optimal position for rabbit ear antennas.
5 Stars EXCELLENT BOOK!
I read this book from cover to cover I learn a lot about Facebook. I became sorta addicted to Facebook. After four weeks I had to find a way to block facebook. [...]
2 Stars Out of Date
This book is hopelessly out-of-date. Very few of the screen-prints and menu options in the book are still accurate.
1 Star Outdated – nearly worthless
I am surprised that Amazon still sells this book without posting a disclaimer that it is so outdated as to be nearly worthless. Again and again readers are advised to go to menus that do not exist, or to click on links “at the top of any page” that no longer appear anywhere, on even one page. To make matters worse, the index omits many essential terms, so when the text refers you to a nonexistent feature, there is no way to tell whether it is simply a misprint, or if the same feature is discussed elsewhere in the book.
Some of the basic information is still usable, but for optimizing your use of Facebook, you would be far better off saving your money and putting your questions to random middle schoolers on the nearest street corner.
4 Stars Your Never Too Old to Learn Facebook
My two grown children kept telling me I HAD to get on Facebook. Now I know nothing of the likes of it so I was not eager. My daughter came by to set me up on Sunday and give me a few pointers. Two days later I went to book store and saw Facebook: The Missing Manual and thumbed through it, came home and immediately ordered it through Amazon. It is a GREAT resource for those of us who did not grow up with MySpace, Twitter, etc. I have expanded my Facebook account with so many things, like keeping track of the books I read, playing Scrabble with my daughter long-distance and just keeping up with the goings-on of the whole family. Without The Missing Manual, I would have kept to the front page and left the rest to those who know how. Definitely a MUST-HAVE!
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