Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Photo by Will Conley

Saturday, November 19, 2011

"Facebook for Beginners" Gently Leads New Users Through the Maze

Facebook for Beginners (facebookforbeginners.blogspot.com) is a new blog of mini-lessons for people new to Facebook. It's "to-the-point and caffeine-free."


Willconleysfacebookforbeginnersheaderscreenshot
 
In writing for Facebook for Beginners, I try to keep posts as short and sweet as possible. I want to help new users overcome their fears and just wade into it one random step at a time. Facebook can be very intimidating, especially for someone for whom the Internet is a foreign land of scary Porn and Codes and Viruses and Stalkers.

New users often have a lot of random, elementary, or seemingly unimportant questions, such as:
Can I delete this email I got from Facebook?

How can I send a message to all of my Facebook friends at once?

What's a wall?

But in fact it's those types of odd questions which, if brushed off and left unanswered, can linger in the mind and get in the way of learning. Facebook for Beginners is designed to answer those odd questions so new users can become veterans as soon as possible.

Every post is a random definition, how-to, or informational tidbit about using Facebook. (Don't worry, articles can also be searched or browsed via archive and tag cloud, all organized-like.)

You most certainly know someone you can direct to that blog. Is it your dad? Your grandmother? A co-worker who has stopped scoffing whenever you mention Facebook and is now curious about it? Someone from Alpha Centauri who has never seen one of our primitive human laptops?

When you figure out who that is, direct them to facebookforbeginners.blogspot.com.