I think one of the crucial things you have to decide if you want to make friends is to know what it is you want to 'do' with them.
People are essentially reward seeking machines. And people tend to seek relationships based on their assessment of others ability to introduce things such as pleasure, support and reward into their lives. In other words, friends are essentially people who make life more pleasant than it would be without them.
This means that if we want to have friends, we must find ways of making life pleasant for others. There is no shortage of means of accomplishing this... jokes, cooking, dancing, games, a nice place to go.
Being a friend means having the initiative to take a certain amount of responsibility for the health, happiness, pleasure, success, etc, of others.
The means of doing this is down to you but it works best if the way you help others to be feel good about themselves is through things you like doing too.
By initiative and responsibility I mean you have to find ways of making friends with others. When I was in education I started a study group.
At work I have taken it upon myself to invite other workers out for drinks.
As an aspie it is much harder to read social cues of others. Social cues are very often non-verbal signals people send out, through their body language, facial expression, and tone of voice, which signal what they really want. It is very easy to become paralyzed by thoughts of what is appropriate and what isn't. The thing is that people have different ideas about what is appropriate to them and as aspies we find it much harder to navigate the social jungle as these signals are hard for us to read. It's like a language we don't speak or a game we don't have the rules to. I think of it being like an emotional dyslexia.
One thing to do is take time to observe others: How they interact with each other. Go to places where people interact but it isn't seen as strange to Not participate: Coffee shops for example. Simply take some time watching what happy, sociable people do.
If you have a good imagination you can role play in your mind taking part in happy social gatherings... imagine how you would want to act and be seen by others.
One of the basics of social skills is empathy and it's the hardest thing in the world for us... but take it as your life's challenge. Try to understand and accept that even if you won't ever be a TV star, you can improve your skills and success and happiness with effort and positive activity.
Also accept that as an aspie you may simply not enjoy the things others do as much as they do. You may in fact enjoy activities by yourself just as much as they like being sociable. In other words, respect the differences you have from others.
Give yourself a pat on the back for trying: Just by asking questions you're helping yourself, and others too because we All want answers that lead us to better friends. One of the steps to doing so is to think of ways we can become that better friend or partner and one way of doing that is to try to predict what kinds of things others seek in their relationships: Fun, pleasure, excitement, status, for example.
A friendship is a kind of relationship, and almost any relationship I can think of involves helping others to get the things they want - from the tangible things like property to the intangible things like feelings - usually in exchange for something you want.