Here’s my list of ways that you can increase your Facebook friend count and enrich your life with the help of new people. At the time of writing I have over 600 Facebook friends using the methods below.
Oh and there’s quite a lot to look at here, so if you’re serious about making new Facebook friends, why not add this page to your favourites so you can come back some other time?

1. Use Facebook’s built-in Find Friends feature

Go to Facebook’s Find Friends section and enter your email address and password. This will then pull in all the contacts in your email account and tell you if they’re on Facebook. Do this for all the email accounts you have. The “People You May Know” section at the bottom of the page could also throw up some contacts.

2. Use the search box to find people with similar interests

Usually the search box is used just to find specific people, so you might enter “John Smith”. But how about trying to find people who have the same interests as you? If you like the music of say, David Bowie - type “David Bowie” into the search box and see a list of people who are interested in him too. To narrow the search, try whatever you’re interested in and then your local area - so I could try - “David Bowie Halifax” to pull out all the people in my local area (Halifax) who are interested in David Bowie. When you find those people, send them a message to strike up a conversation about your shared interest. If it goes well, hit them with a friend request.

3. Join groups

Facebook has a vast array of user created groups that grows every day. Just click on the Groups link on your left menu in Facebook and use the search box to find groups related to things you like. For instance, if you like video games, type in “Nintendo” or whatever your favourite console is to find like-minded people. Now join the groups you’re interested in, particpate in the Discussion Board section and post on the Wall. Get talking to people in the group and request their friendship. And just by joining lots of groups means you’re putting yourself out there where people can find you.

4. Put your profile address on business cards

Obviously this only applies if you use business cards! Next time you get some printed up, why not have your Facebook profile address added? It’s all about advertising your profile.

5. Put your profile address in email signatures

You send emails right? Why not put the address of your profile in that signature with an invitation for the reader to add you as a friend?

6. Put your profile address in forum signatures and forum profile

Most web discussion forums allow the adding of some kind of signature to your posts - add your Facebook profile address there. Usually you can also add a web address to your forum profile - stick your Facebook address in there too. And make sure you’re active on as many forums as you can be.

7. Add your Facebook profile to your own blog or website (even if don’t have one yet!)

You can easily create a Facebook badge to include on your own blog or website. Check out Facebook’s Create Badge page to make a badge like the one I have at the top of this page.

Not got your own website or blog? Get a free blog now and start blogging - even if your only post is to write about your Facebook profile! It’s another way to advertise your Facebook profile. Try a free blog at Blogger. See the blog I created at Blogger simply to promote my Facebook profile - My Blogger Blog

8. Join friend finding groups and post on walls

Now don’t tell anyone, but numbers 8 and 9 on this list are the absolute killer ways to find new Facebook friends. Friend finding groups are groups that have been set up on Facebook specifically so that people can hook up as friends - completely randomly. Typically you’ll join the group and perhaps post on the wall and add as many friends as you want from the wall or by choosing the group members. Here’s an example of some groups:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28820445233
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204969237
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12467607339
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2427051747
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8068399405

9. Use friend finding groups and invite those who post on walls

Surf the same groups we spoke of in number 8 to find people who have posted on the group’s wall asking for friendship. Then simply request. It’s that simple! You absolutely can not go wrong with these two methods.

10. Google is your friend - use google to find profiles

This is pretty simple. Put this in Google’s search box: “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=” (without the quotes)
It’s going to find a great many pages where people are showing their Facebook profiles as a link. So you naturally know that many of these links will be from people who are actively encouraging you to get in touch.

To add a little more targeting to your search, add something else to your search term, for instance “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= add me” will pull out more people who are specifically looking for people to add them as friends. Note the space after the profile URL and “add me”. Or how about this if I was looking for friends who practice Karate?: “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= karate”. Experiment with your searches.

11. Use the popular press to find interesting people

I’ve done this many times. I read newspapers and watch a little TV. If I see someone interesting with a good story in the press or on TV I’ll search their name on Facebook. If I find them I’ll simply message them, tell them I enjoyed their story or whatever and then ask directly if we can become Facebook friends. OK, you often won’t find them at all and they’ll often turn you down if you do, but this has worked for me and I’ve managed to become friends with some very interesting people this way.

12. Add me!

I’m a likeable kind of fellow who will chat with you if you want to or leave you alone if not. You won’t get hit with lots of apps from me, but I don’t mind you sending me yours. So what have you got to lose? Just click on my Facebook link at the top of the page or right here and add away!: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=647949714

Notes:

Don’t get banned - Whilst all these methods are perfectly within Facebook’s terms and conditions, they do get kind of twitchy over people who add too many friends. There’s no known definition of ‘too many’, so you just need to be careful. The most friends I’ve requested to be my friend with in one day is 20, though I soon cut that down as there was no way I could engage with all those people every day. I now look for 5 new friends a day and accept most of the requests that come my way on top of that.

Got your own methods of finding new Facebook friends? Share them with us in the comments below.

Somehow I keep getting sick. My two boys started full-time at school last September and it seems that everytime they pick up an illness they pass it on to me. But while they become slugish for a day or two, I seem to get some full-on adult version that half kills me. Ok, so that last statement would be obscene to anyone with a real illness, but it feels pretty bad to me at the time!

I consider myself to be pretty fit these days. I don’t drink alchohol any more, don’t smoke, workout regularly, sleep well and I have a very good diet which contains very little junk food. Compared to say, ten years ago I look after myself much better and feel generally very healthy. But I keep getting these illnesses.

So I started thinking about what I could do to give myself the edge to beat them and perhaps boost my all-round health as well. I’d never really liked the idea of taking supplements as I thought that you didn’t need them if you had a good diet. But now I’m not so sure. Of course, the taking of supplements has the so-called experts split down the middle as usual with their judgements.

But I read an article at the Times yesterday that made me wonder about how healthy my food really is. I ended up heading out and buying what I believe is a good quality multivitamin supplement that I’m starting to take every day, though I still have doubts. It’s a case of - what harm can it do? - I guess. But where does it all end? Do I start popping fish oil pills next?

So what are your opinions of supplements and specifically multivitamin supplements?

I started my search somewhere obvious - Windows Live SkyDrive. I say obvious because I’ve been getting hit by their various ads whilst using Hotmail for a while now. I had done a quick scan around at the other big players in online storage as well and none of the names were exactly well known to me. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to invest time in a backup system I want a) it to be very secure b) it not to disappear one day. So my reasoning was that Microsoft’s offering would at least satisfy those criteria.

I’m not going to do a full review of the service here - I just want to talk about the main problem I found. The problem that sends me running off to buy an external drive - speed, or lack of. I did an experiment on two days at different times to allow for variations in service. I had 340 very small files that added up to about 0.5mb. I set my stopwatch and started uploading. The first day it took 35 minutes. The second day it took 41 minutes. Yes, that’s half a meg of data uploaded in well over 30 minutes.

That completely kills the idea for me and the notion that I could in fact use this type of service to access my files from various computers no matter where in the world I was. I guess the service would be good to do backups through the night or something, but it’s not really what I’m looking for.

So I had a quick read around to try and find another service that would handle the speed issue, but it seems they’re all the same. I’m now thinking I need to forget about the idea and revisit it in another year or two. Unless anyone can recommend the type of service I’d like to use in the comments below?

The first thing we do after downloading and installing the new browser is decide which of our current sites we dare visit first. Top of the list has to be our company’s main customer entry point. Once loaded we peer through the fingers covering our eyes to see what the damage is - does the new browser break our beloved site? For me this morning I was pleasantly surprised to find our company website working perfectly.

Next on the list to check are the sites belonging to customers -  in order of how big their account is with us! Now I started to see a few cracks appearing. Nothing major though, just a few problems with CSS alignment.

After that I checked our online shop which is a major source of revenue for us. Again, a couple of slight alignment issues but nothing serious. I was particularly happy about that site being good as it’s got a pretty complex layout, although it is due a pretty major overhaul this year.

So all-in-all I was pretty pleased. Internet Explorer 8 should be a stepping stone to bigger and better things for web designers and I’m hoping I don’t have to invest too many hours preparing the way with our existing sites.

One thing I would like to learn though is when IE8 is going to be rolled out to the general public? Any ideas on this, please post in the comments. I’ve read it’s getting pushed out to a wider audience as a beta in the summer, but don’t know when it’s going live with Joe Public.

Oh, and the site you’re reading - so far so good. Haven’t found any problems yet. Let me know if you see otherwise.

The service is currently beta invite-only. Well worth a look for all you online social networkers out there.

And here’s my (under-cooked at the time of writing) profile at Yahoo! mash - Tim’s Yahoo! mash profile (you need to login first!).

1. “Keep it real - Facebook should be used as a tool to communicate and interact with people you know in real-life. What’s the point of collecting hundreds or thousands of so-called friends you hardly know and don’t possibly have the time to interact with? Maybe people who collect Facebook friends in this way had really lonely childhoods or something?”

2. “Use the web as an opportunity - Facebook can be used as a means of connecting with real-life friends and for me to create a wider web of friends. To me, the more friends I have in life the better, even if they are ‘only’ virtual friends. A wider circle of friends can create opportunities for partner relationships, jobs, business and purely social occasions”

Which side of the fence do you sit on? I’m firmly on the side of opinion number 2 - use the web as an opportunity - but I’d like to expand on my reasons why.

I don’t have a problem with people who want to ‘keep it real’ and have a low number of friends on Facebook (or any other online social networking site), but so many of them have a problem with those of us that want as many friends as we can get. There’s a snobbery going on there and I’m not sure of the root cause. But who cares, I have my own reasons for wanting 5000 Facebook friends and as many friends on other sites as I can get. By the way, if you didn’t know, 5000 is the limit Facebook places on the number of friends you can have. Which is kind of weird, but the subject for another topic…

Why I want 5000 Facebook friends:

Because to me, having 5000 friends in life is better than having 5. Surely the relationship I have with these 5000 friends will be more diluted than the relationship I could have with 5 close friends, I hear you say? Perhaps, but the combined knowledge, experience and social power of 5000 people is way greater than 5. And surely you’re not saying that I can’t gain some meaningful relationships too? I believe in percentages. The more friends I have, the more opportunities can be created.

And I’ll throw in another argument against restricting your friends list to people you only know in the real world: if there was no Facebook, would I suddenly lose the ability to connect with all my real-life friends? Of course not. I keep written address and phone number books. I have my friends’ telephone numbers stored in my mobile phone. I have their email addresses. I know where they live and can hop in my car to see them. If the web was switched off tomorrow, life would go on. So why not use the power of the web to broaden your horizons?

For those of you that agree with my thinking, why not add me as friend on Facebook?

Although I’ve been around the web since 1997 it’s only in 2008 that I’ve decided to get serious about online social networking. Of course during the time I’ve been on the web I’ve been socially active online through emails and numerous web forums and it’s only in recent years that the whole social boom has really kicked in.

In later years I’ve become involved with YouTube, flickr, plus mine and other people’s blogs. All these have a social networking element to them, but really the focus of this post is sites like MySpace and Facebook which exist almost exclusively for networking.

I started out with MySpace in the spring of 2007 and although it was initially quite exciting I quickly became bored with the site and the seemingly tenuous nature of the ‘friendships’ I had on there. Of course I was quickly hit by a number of bands wanting to promote themselves by gaining as many ‘friends’ as they could. This seemed fine to me but I really wanted to connect with people and dropped my involvement with the site (although I’m still registered with them).

About the same time I signed up for Facebook after someone invited me. At the time Facebook seemed even more boring than MySpace and left me thinking these sites were good if you had nothing else to do with your life. Then late in January of this year I got an email alert from Facebook saying a lady wanted to be my friend. I think at the time I had about 5 friends on there as I just hadn’t tried at all. It turns out the woman in question was an old friend from my childhood that I’d had no contact with for 28 years.

Of course I was really pleased to hear from my old friend, but this got my imagination going and made me look at Facebook more closely. A lot had changed in the time I’d been away, most significantly the fact that Facebook had opened up the site to third-party developers. By the time I got back to the show, third-party developers had been going crazy building new apps for at least 6 months. Also during that time the take up of membership had grown amazingly in certain countries, including my own - the UK. This was leading to a great deal of press coverage and the inevitable worries about privacy - all of which created a big buzz. Plus I now had a wider range of real-life friends who were on there to hook up with.

I was also thinking about more ways to grow my online businesses and the online social networking phenomenon seemed like an obvious area to look at. Obviously this is the future and some very large businesses around the globe are investing heavily in research into this topic. I decided it was time for me to get in on the act and consolidate my current online activities to create one large online social identity to take into the future.

Incidentally, the creation of the website you now read is part of all that. I’d thought about a personal blog (as opposed to my other, niche topic blogs) for a long time, but had shied away from getting too personal. In embracing an online identity fully, I believe you need to completely open up about who you are and market yourself fully. So I took the plunge with the blog at last. Ultimately I hope this website will be my online identity’s portal - all other sites I’m a part of will point here and vice versa.

So what this post is really about is an introduction to what should become a vast section on online social marketing. I’m going to blog about everything I do in that field and I’ll be trying out all the major sites along the way. This could go on indefinitely of course as new sites and ideas come online all the time.
As a starting point for this section, I’d like to map out where I am with online social networking as of the 9th of March 2008:

• Active on about half a dozen forums
• Post videos for my online shop and personal hobbies on YouTube
• Post hobby photos on flickr that get fed into blogs
• Have a MySpace account currently with 78 friends - not touched it for months
• Have a Facebook account that has become my real starting point in experimenting with online social networking. Currently have 308 friends
• Have 3 blogs that I actively work on, though to differing degrees

The rest of this section will describe the rest of my journey.

It’s not my first blog, but up until now I feel like I’ve just been learning and playing around with blogs. This one’s going to put together everything I’ve learned and hopefully develop much further.

So please, enjoy your stay!