Failing at Facebook, need help

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I recently decided to use Facebook to find some friends from my past, in the hopes that I would at least have SOMEONE to talk to. So I had this old account that I set up a couple of years ago and never used. I set up my profile and photo and managed after 3 days to get 4 friends. One friend is a person I was very glad to locate, but he's the only one so far. Now I feel like a total failure because he has all of these lovely family photos posted and photos of trips all over hell and back.

I know there are people I'd like to locate from my time in graduate school, but can't find them on Facebook. Then I start messing around and see that people I barely know at my daughter's elementary school have like 200 or even 300 friends!! !! I'm so jealous and frustrated. How do they do it? I know some of these people but would not be able to get up the nerve to ask them to be my friends. I feel like I'm in high school all over again, and it feels really bad.

I am in my 50's and I realize that I maybe just don't have the proper Facebook attitude. Can anyone help?

If you don't mind finding some friends that you don't already know in real life, then you could try "liking" and then posting on pages related to your interests. A large portion of my facebook "friends" are people who added me after seeing me post on various reptile-related fan pages. If i only talked to people that i knew well in real life then i wouldn't be on there much at all, lol. You could also try looking through your few friends' friends to see if you know any of them at all(or even have ever spoken to them at all. because it seems like a lot of people on there add pretty much anyone that they recognize from anywhere). I started using facebook a few months ago, and i've found that i really like it.. I mostly post on fan pages, comment on any of my "friends" status updates that seem interesting, and post pictures.

Look for alumni groups from high school and college and get listed on them. I found two of the guys I use hang out with in school and friended them that way. I also stumbled into two guys I use to play D&D with I did not know they knew each other.

Just an FYI, Facebook makes their money by data mining their users' information and selling it to other companies.

quickest way to get a completely unmanageable list of several hundred irritating 'friends' is to play one of the silly games such as "farmville" or "cafeworld".
People add other people who play in order to get bonus stuff in the games. There are groups and pages specifically for the purpose of assisting those people to find each other and go friend-adding-crazy.
Sometimes you get lucky and actually like some of the people you add but chances are those people with 300+ friends have that many friends because of the games.

edit to add... Most people on facebook are happy to add anyone they don't specifically hate, so if you know and like someone don't hesitate to send a friend request.
And for those people you would like to get in touch with... If females have gotten married they may have a different name, and some people have fake names anyway but every time you add someone who you think might know those you can't find, try checking their friendlist to see if they've already found the others.

_________________
G'day... I'm new here.. I'm not very good at introducing myself
so I'm gonna just start talking and y'all can get used to me

Your Aspie score: 155 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 57 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

Woah, don't ever compare yourself to other facebook people- down that path madness lies!

People add everyone whose name they ever heard of; result, they have 300 friends. If you watch their threads, they only ever talk to about 3 of these. Nobody has 300 friends.

People add the pictures that they know will make themselves look cool and popular. You don't see people posting up pictures of their 9-5 office job, or their trip to the dentist.

Their life is nowhere near as awesome as they're hoping it looks. If it were, they wouldn't be spending so much time on facebook.

You can upload your photos to facebook and scan the old ones and put them on a disk or card and then upload those too.

And I don't care about how many friends I have. People who have tons of friends on there aren't even their real friends. I bet if you removed one of them as a friend, they won't even notice because they have so many of them they won't even know who took them off and who did it. In fact I doubt they remember who they have in their friends so if one of them decides to remove them, they won't notice.

And I don't talk to everyone on my Facebook. I only talk occasionally to a few people. I just like to read walls my friends had posted on their wall and I often don't check out links people post or videos.

I also don't add people as friends. I rarely do that.

Thanks to everyone. I will try your sugestions. Many of the people I actually want to find as real friends don't seem to be on Facebook, or I just can't find them yet. They are 50-something people like me and maybe its a generational thing--maybe they don't use Facebook. I feel like such a loser with 4 friends. It dredges up all my old insecurities. Thanks again. Maybe I'll play one of those games and see what happens.