Where can I find a manual for Facebook?

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After fiddling with Facebook for a while, to me it looks like largely a waste of time (“Oh, look, Billybob spent the day at the beach, and Bessie Mae likes the coffee at her new job!”), but before giving up on it completely, I’d like to know that I’ve checked out all its possibilities. The interface is so labyrinthine that I’m sure I won’t learn all there is to know merely by fiddling on my own, so I’ve been looking for some help. The Facebook Help section is inadequate, and what Google has turned up is not useful at all. So I’m wondering is anyone knows of a thorough, intelligently organized, up-to-date online manual.

If no such thing exists, I’m curious why not.

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If no such thing exists, I’m curious why not.

Why not? FaceBook is presumed to be utterly intuitive, and its usage obvious even to young children.

It’s hard to gainsay your conclusion that FaceBook is largely a waste of time. And you can, with even more justification, include Twitter in that view.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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I’ve vaguely heard that Facebook and Twitter might be useful in certain ways, Facebook for organizing family events, hockey teams, etc. It seems possible to follow breaking news from the grassroots using Twitter. So I would like to see what can be done before I dismiss them both definitively.

Intuitive? A menuing system is intuitive. Clicking on a hyperlink with a vague label that will take you to you-can-only-guess-where is stupid. The kids may be willing to waste hour after hour clicking all over the place to see what happens, but I want a logical guide so I get the lay of the land in the quickest possible way. I’ve put a hold on a library book entitled Facebook: The Missing Manual (2011). Maybe that will do the job. I’d still like to have a handy online manual, too.

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I do not know of a User Manual for Facebook. Will this do?

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I visit Facebook rarely, so this is not the most informed perspective.

There have been a lot of books published on Facebook, but for better or worse, it changes so often that such books quickly become inaccurate. I was helping someone with their privacy preferences yesterday, and they were completely different than I remembered from six months ago.

If you want to locate people from your past, or keep up with the activity of selected friends/relatives, Facebook is a useful tool. It also has become a popular platform for participating in various social/political groups and consumer product companies’ loyalty programs, although these might be accessible through other channels as well. Then there are lots of way to waste time…

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After fiddling with Facebook for a while, to me it looks like largely a waste of time (“Oh, look, Billybob spent the day at the beach, and Bessie Mae likes the coffee at her new job!”), but before giving up on it completely, I’d like to know that I’ve checked out all its possibilities. The interface is so labyrinthine that I’m sure I won’t learn all there is to know merely by fiddling on my own, so I’ve been looking for some help. The Facebook Help section is inadequate, and what Google has turned up is not useful at all. So I’m wondering is anyone knows of a thorough, intelligently organized, up-to-date online manual.

If no such thing exists, I’m curious why not.

Yea David, but did Billybob have fun and did Bessie Mae have Folgers or what brand?……. Sorry couldn’t resist!
but all kidding aside, I had to read the help section more than once to get it set the way I wanted it after all the new changes, and I’m still not satisfied… Just Sayin’

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The interface is so labyrinthine that I’m sure I won’t learn all there is to know merely by fiddling on my own…

Thank you so much for starting this thread — I had begun to wonder whether I was “losing it” because I find the facebook interface appalling, disorganised and convoluted and far too volatile to ever get a fix on. My opinion FWIW is that it has been slung together rather quickly in the early days and since then has suffered from patchitis with one patch altering the previous one until it looks like a 30-year-old pair of work jeans. It’s time they threw them away and bought a brand new pair but they are afraid of alienating the now massive user-base who raise howls of protest at even the smallest change so a complete redesign would cause global apoplexy. This is why I only maintain a simple locked-down account to enable people to be able to contact me who prefer to use it to email.

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Thank you so much for starting this thread —
I had begun to wonder whether I was “losing it” …
facebook interface appalling, disorganised and convoluted …
My opinion FWIW is that it has been slung together rather quickly in the early days …
It’s time they threw them away …
to enable people to be able to contact me who prefer to use it to email.

Well then, here I go:

Thanks from me also!

I don’t think you or I are “losing it”; we just may have grown up with the understanding that we want to accomplish something somewhat defined … and that goes totally against Facebook’s philosophy – if such a thing even exists.

IMHO the “interface” is absolutely useless because it seems not to be task oriented. I never got lost as quickly as in Facebook. Even by only looking at my kid’s Facebook page I see more info from/about people I have never known (and likely may not even want to know?) than about my kids and the grand kids. I am just plain not interested in what Molly Dogstail thinks about my grandson’s picture.

Oh yes, the beginnings of it have been slung together as a college student’s side job. But years of corporate spin have totally covered up that fact.

They will never “throw it away” for exactly the reason you peak of and because by now it’s BIG business!

Do I really want to communicate with somebody who “prefer to use it to email”? I don’t think so.

Let me add a quip of my own:[INDENT]Right behind computers Facebook IMHO is the devil’s second most successful attempt to steal our time.[/INDENT]

Howdy.[INDENT]
[/INDENT]

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IMHO the “interface” is absolutely useless because it seems not to be task oriented. I never got lost as quickly as in Facebook. Even by only looking at my kid’s Facebook page I see more info from/about people I have never known (and likely may not even want to know?) than about my kids and the grand kids. I am just plain not interested in what Molly Dogstail thinks about my grandson’s picture.

I think you’re probably missing the point of the site. It’s not a task-oriented website, and therefore neither is its interface. It’s a social-consumption website – it’s event oriented. If something happens, facebook tells you about it, and you can respond to said event appropriately.

Ok, it is, however, task oriented at the start of the event chain. If you want to upload a photo, you click “upload photo”. If you want to look at someone specific, you type their name in the top bar. (etc. etc.) But most things are reactive; if somebody says something you agree with, you react to it by ‘liking’ it.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re looking at facebook from a task standpoint you probably need to change viewpoints a little. Most of your time on Facebook is spent consuming rather than producing (contrast that with, say, MS Word, or even email(where one could say the split is about 50-50)).

The other product I associate it most with in this context is Google Reader. Primary function: showing you things you want to read. Boom, right there, front page. Secondary function: adding things to that list. Front page, but a small button.

Hope that made sense. :S

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I think you’re probably missing the point of the site …. It’s a social-consumption website – it’s event oriented. If something happens, facebook tells you about it, and you can respond to said event appropriately….

I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re looking at facebook from a task standpoint you probably need to change viewpoints a little. Most of your time on Facebook is spent consuming rather than producing ….

The other product I associate it most with in this context is Google Reader. Primary function: showing you things you want to read.

Hope that made sense. :S

Thanks, fphhotchips!

That truly is sort of enlightening to me, I never looked at it this way!

Now talking only about Facebook pages of people I genuinely care about: What I see there is often rather “mindless chatter” by tons of people I have never met and may not even want or care to meet. I am an old timer and thrive on conversations, exchange and contributing information in both directions.

The whole concept of “consuming” doesn’t too sit well with me anyway, so here seems to be at least part of my problem.

Thanks again.

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You wouldnt think it possibe to purposely design it this way – maybe someone hacked the interface & they are still trying to undo the damage. An irrational design designed by a (rich) irrational person maybe?

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I have a Facebook account, but I don’t use it and it’s inactive. (I have a life.) However, as a volunteer at our public library I have checked back in “Facebook for Dummies” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook.” I have no idea whether they are any good. Someone who cares (that would not be me) might like to review them and report back.

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Makeuseof.com ( http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/download ) has a couple of manuals on Facebook that are free to download. They might or might not prove to be useful. I believe you need to sign up for their newsletter to download the manuals.

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The OP asked “If no such thing exists, I’m curious why not. “. The answer is simple: Because it’s constantly changing. Nothing written will be true in 90 days. I know someone who tried to write a manual, but since authoring and proof reading and publishing and advertising take more than 90 days, she couldn’t keep up with the changes.

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DanGuzman has it right. They run a secret snoop on my account and change the interface as soon as I start to get the hang of something or remove a feature when I begin to rely on it. I used to keep my own grouping of my Family so I could find them easily, and they replaced it with their “Family” group which seems to require a DNA test to set up, and I swear I was able to enter photo descriptions when I first uploaded an album – now I have to “edit” each photo separately – or maybe I just can’t find the current way to do it!

Meanwhile, I wish they would create a decent photo filter to weed out the endless out-of-focus, too-dark, flash reflection-in-the-mirror and too-many-essentially-duplicate shots! Obviously today’s contributors think that if one terrible photo is OK, many are great!

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I used to keep my own grouping of my Family so I could find them easily, and they replaced it with their “Family” group which seems to require a DNA test to set up…

I try to avoid “family” requests and just use my own friend groupings for privacy reasons. Perhaps you need to use a name other than “family” to make that work.

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”If no such thing exists, I’m curious why not. “. The answer is simple: Because it’s constantly changing.

I agree, it’s in FB’s interest to keep things ‘labyrinthine’ and changing. The general response rates to FB’s ads are way below web norms, so the last thing FB needs is easy ways for people to hide their info from advertisers, or easy ways for writers to describe how to do it, or software to do it. No ads = no FB.

Lugh.
~
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I too went to MakeUseOf to get a link to a guide
Turs out they don’t have a comprehensive guide for FB – they do for Twitter, Ubuntu, and many other topics
A quick search though turned up the following in their forums though

In the meantime, have a look at all MakeUseOf articles on Facebook.
ToMuse has a very good guide on Facebook suited for beginners.
Mashable has a comprehensive Facebook Guidebook covering all sorts of topics.

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Good thread, I have been wondering the same thing as I am looking to use Facebook for a small home based business. I was going to do a bit of searching and reading over the weekend. My biggest concern is locking certain things down so that I only share what I want and not “give away the farm” so to speak.

Meanwhile, I wish they would create a decent photo filter to weed out the endless out-of-focus, too-dark, flash reflection-in-the-mirror and too-many-essentially-duplicate shots! Obviously today’s contributors think that if one terrible photo is OK, many are great!

This isn’t just a Facebook problem. I participate on several photography websites. Its amazing how many blurry snapshots of cats people offer for sale.

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I have a small “Facebook for Dummies” (mini edition). It was written in 2010 by Leah Pearlman and Carolyn Abram, Facebook Product Managers. It was published by Wiley Publishing.

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A few years ago, just after Facebook was getting a lot of really negative publicity about the site’s security, a lady by the name of Angela Alcom wrote a manuscript called “The Unofficial Facebook Privacy Manual”. I believe it was available either at http://www.MakeUseOf.com or http://www.netsavoir.com . I don’t know whether it’s still around or not, or how up-to-date it might be. That’s the only reference I’ve ever seen except for, of course, the Facebook site itself, which isn’t that easy to follow.

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There are lots of books about Facebook – have a look at Amazon; the UK site gave me 2922 hits. Here are a few.

Facebook For Dummies
Facebook Application Development For Dummies
Facebook for Business: How to Create a Facebook Business Page That Works — From the Basics to Using Facebook’s Advanced Mark Up Language (FBML)
How to Do Everything: Facebook Applications
Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
Facebook: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)
Facebook for the Older Generation
Sams Teach Yourself Facebook for Business in 10 Minutes: Covers Facebook Places, Facebook Deals and Facebook Ads (Sams Teach Yourself…in 10 Minutes)
Facebook Cookbook: Building Applications to Grow Your Facebook Empire
Facebook for the Computer Illiterate: An Absolute Beginners Guide to Mastering Facebook
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook

Not that I think you need a book – as someone else pointed out, there is a help system. And it’s easy and fun, and I can see what my siblings and my kids and my former students are doing. Why do you all attack it so?

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Why do you all attack it so?

For me, because I don’t like being treated as a commodity.
Before you say “well don’t use it”, you should know that I don’t.
Getting rid of my account was a nightmare.

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Facebook has a dismal reputation when it comes to privacy issues. This is evidently a problem that starts at the top, with Facebook co-founder, President, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Nick Bilton summed it up neatly in a Tweet:
Off record chat w/ Facebook employee. Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.
This does not appear to be a new development, either. In 2003, when Facebook was called “The Facebook” and Zuckerberg operated it from his Harvard dorm room, he said some regrettable things in an IM conversation about users of the fledgling social networking site, according to a SocialMediaNews article:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard.
Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
(Friend): What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it. I don’t know why.
They “trust me”
[EDITED]

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The only manual that you could ever hope to be up-to-date would be some type of online help, such as what Adobe provides for Photoshop. As many have pointed out FB changes to frequently, so don’t waste money on buying a book.

They just had major updates to the FB iPhone app that actually comes close to a joy to use. The new UI is very nice!

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Sorry to drift OT but Twitter can actually be quite useful if you regard it as a simple RSS reader and use it to follow a variety of reputable news sources such as broadcasters and newspapers.

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Go to About.com click on the category letter ‘s’ then click on Social Media. The Personal Web page that comes up has a Facebook tutorial link.

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Lots of chatter here about books and other sources of help for FB. However, the original question was about FB having its own help or tutorial. When I have a problem with MS Word, say in doing a mailmerge, I don’t want to go to a store or library to get a book – I want to get help from the product’s internal or online Help.

The online Help for FB sucks. FB is fixed or patched so frequently that it is now a mess of patches and fixes. It was not created as a logical application, with a project plan – it was thrown together rapidly by one guy, and has been constantly patched and fixed in response to complaints.

Having worked in software development, I can tell you that the Help is the last thing to get updated or changed – in virutally all projects. I think this is probably the same with FB. Patches and fixes are coming so fast, they can’t keep up with updating the Help to keep in sync.

I loath FB – the only reason I have an account, is because my daughter insisted I get an account so I can view photos of her and my grandson, since that is her preferred method of sharing photos. (she is in Florida, I am in Canada). My account is as minimal as can be, with absolutely no personal information available.. including my name (I use a pseudonym). But, I must say, it is still hard for me to weed out all crap on her account, just so I can see her photos.

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“I loath FB – the only reason I have an account, is because my daughter insisted I get an account so I can view photos of her and my grandson, since that is her preferred method of sharing photos. (she is in Florida, I am in Canada). My account is as minimal as can be, with absolutely no personal information available.. including my name (I use a pseudonym). But, I must say, it is still hard for me to weed out all crap on her account, just so I can see her photos.[/QUOTE]

This could be my words exactly except I’m in Texas and haven’t worked in the software developing business.. The pressure to join and stay a member of FB is huge. I deactivated my account once and you’d have thought I was guilty of murder! And I agree, keeping up with the lightening fast changes requires WAY too much of our time. At 60, I just don’t have the desire to spend my time making sure my account isn’t abused by outsiders. In fact, after reading so many of the members posts here, I think I will make sure NO ONE has any idea who I am except for close family members. IF that is even possible!

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“I loath FB – the only reason I have an account, is because my daughter insisted I get an account so I can view photos of her and my grandson…”

FB’s utility has been vastly oversold! And I can’t help thinking that there’s something vaguely offensive about obliging a parent to go to a quasi-public site to view photos of his/her daughter and grandson. (Who the hell else is actually interested? Maybe her siblings, if she has any, and her in-laws, but that’s about all.) Both the parent and daughter obviously have email; that would be a far more thoughtful, sensitive, way to communicate and share personal family photos.

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Both the parent and daughter obviously have email; that would be a far more thoughtful, sensitive, way to communicate and share personal family photos.

Hopefully people won’t start sending me dozens of photo attachments. I think online albums (Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, or another platform), set to be as private as you want, are much more convenient for everyone.

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…. are much more convenient for everyone.

This part of the sentence says it all, IMHO at least. It is so darned “convenient”.

I told our kids that I’d prefer an email update with attached picture(s) but you know what? They are too lazy, email is too inconvenient.

Tempora mutantur. Whether I like it or not, they do.

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OK, so I recently did set up an FB account, as I said in an earlier post for a small home business. I was (emphasis on WAS) one of the FB detractors. What’s the point? And why do I want to know that Billy Bob took an extra 10 minutes minutes to get his mail today? Silly, right?

Well, once I learned my way around I’m actually finding it to be pretty useful and pretty cool. Yes, for those of us used to task oriented computing, the interface sucks. Plain and simple. And getting help is clunky at best. The first thing that annoyed me was that every time I clicked or connected with a “friend”, my news feed and e-mail would get bombarded with crap. Yes, there are certain acquaintances I want to be connected with, but I don’t need every boring detail of their lives, or their personal causes in my news feed. However, I did the Google searches on how to control various aspects of FB. More often than not it took me right to the relevant FB help page. Not only can you see as much or as little as you want of other people’s “wall”, you can show others as much or as little of your own as you want. For example, put your HS in, make it public, and you’ll be advertised to everyone that went the same HS. Put in your HS, but make it available only to friends and family, and only they see it. Or do like me and don’t enter anything. I have almost no personal information available. Many of these options have only been added in the past few months. So much of the hype around lack of privacy is a thing of the past, and now only a myth.

As mentioned in above posts, the constantly changing landscape of FB probably makes it impossible to have anything like an FB manual. But I found it pretty easy to learn what I needed in a very short time. Its a bit like a tax form, don’t try to understand it, just take it one step at a time you’ll conquer it in no time. As far as convenience goes, isn’t that what computing is all about? Convenience? I’m finding FB to pretty useful and convenient now that I’ve tamed it for my use.

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Doc,
If you don’t want to receive status updates, in your e-mail, via text, or any other, then you can turn all of that off. I did this and then reset to only receive updates from my friends, not friends of friends, and family. Although I did it by accident. I was getting updates via all three modes (mail, Facebook, and text) You can find it all in your settings.
Good luck
John

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Doc,
If you don’t want to receive status updates, in your e-mail, via text, or any other, then you can turn all of that off. I did this and then reset to only receive updates from my friends, not friends of friends, and family. Although I did it by accident. I was getting updates via all three modes (mail, Facebook, and text) You can find it all in your settings.
Good luck
John

I know that. That was the point of my post. More to the point, I was trying to convey that to those who have a negative view of FB. Apparantly I failed to convey that message.

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Zuckerberg lost the lawsuit. Yesterday’s news, literally. :^). FB will have to tighten up things and submit to audits every two years for the next 20. I, like others, have an account, but rarely use it. In fact, once I deleted it. Or thought I did. When my son asked me to re-establish it, I found they hadn’t actually deleted anything, it was all still there. I do follow some things but no applications and have my settings locked down tightly. And there is a useful feature that allows you to “hide” posts from any one or company that annoys you. I use THAT feature more than any other. Cuz I don’t care what Tilly had for breakfast. There are company pages I look at from time to time, no harm, no foul. And no one makes anyone use it. Or Twitter for that matter. :^)

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After fiddling with Facebook for a while, to me it looks like largely a waste of time (“Oh, look, Billybob spent the day at the beach, and Bessie Mae likes the coffee at her new job!”), but before giving up on it completely, I’d like to know that I’ve checked out all its possibilities. The interface is so labyrinthine that I’m sure I won’t learn all there is to know merely by fiddling on my own, so I’ve been looking for some help. The Facebook Help section is inadequate, and what Google has turned up is not useful at all. So I’m wondering is anyone knows of a thorough, intelligently organized, up-to-date online manual.

If no such thing exists, I’m curious why not.

Try this URL:http://www.cio.com/article/508121/Facebook_Bible_Everything_You_Need_to_Know_About_Facebook

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Just as an aside to the main thread, could I implore everyone to shun entirely all those companies that say “join us on facebook and ‘like’ us to get a chance to win…blah blah…” as a way to insidiously worm their way into your friends list… you don’t ‘LIKE’ them at all, you are just trying to get an iPad for zilch and inflicting their pervasive influence upon your friends and family motivated by a lousy marketing ploy… DON’T DO IT and DON’T BUY FROM THEM. This is the only way to kill this annoying stealth advertising stone dead.

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Lisa, you’ve done just about everything you can to make yourself quite invisible on FB. But you can also hide everything your daughter posts except pictures.

On the left side of your FB page you’ll see your list of “friends” and family. Click on your daughter’s link. In the upper right look for a button called “Subscribed”. Click it and you’ll see a list of options. Uncheck everything but Photos.

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