Social Networking for the Older and Wiser^®

Appendix A: How to use your web browser

Equipment needed: Access to a computer with an Internet connection and a web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Safari.

Skills needed: Some familiarity with the computer, including the ability to find and run programs.

One of the great things about social networking is that it mostly takes place using your web browser. That means you can log in from any computer and have all your data and friends available to you. It also means you don’t need to install any software, and you probably already have most of the skills you’ll need.

This appendix explains how to get the best from your browser, so that you can easily use the social networking websites in this book. If you’re the kind of person who already does all the Christmas shopping online, or who follows the football headlines on the Internet, you will already have the skills required for social networking. But this appendix will also introduce you to some advanced features of your browser, which you might not know about yet.

What is a web browser?

Your web browser is the program that enables you to undertake all the activities of the World Wide Web, the most popular part of the Internet. Using your web browser, you can connect to your bank, an online store or an organisation like the BBC for the latest news and weather. Most companies are online today, but there is also a vast wealth of knowledge and entertainment that private individuals have put on the Web. Websites (also sometimes called ‘sites’) are destinations on the Internet: they are places you can access articles and photos, places you can browse and shop, and places where you can watch films or listen to music.

In the early days of the Web, using it was a passive affair: like TV or radio, all the information travelled one way. Today’s websites are more sophisticated and interactive, and social networking websites are at the forefront of innovation. They provide a hub where you can meet with your friends and socialise, and enable you to publish your own content on the Internet for access by your friends or by the world at large.

Your web browser is the program that enables you to visit websites. If you’re using Microsoft Windows, it is most likely to be Internet Explorer, which is by far the most popular browser. There is also a browser made by Apple, called Safari, and by Google, called Chrome, as well as two independent browsers called Opera and Firefox. They’re all free, but you only need one, so just use whatever’s already installed.

This chapter uses Internet Explorer as an example, but if you’re using a different browser, don’t worry. The features are largely the same, although the buttons and controls might look different and be in different places.

Taking a tour of your browser

Start your browser. If you’re using Internet Explorer, you should see an icon for this on your desktop or in your start menu. It looks like a blue lower case ‘e’, with a Saturn-style ring around it. When you open your browser, it starts to download your start page, which means it copies it to your computer from the Internet.

Your web browser is one of the simplest programs you’ll ever use. There are thirteen main controls you need to know about, which is nothing compared to programs like Word or Excel. Here they are in Figure A1:

Reproduced from Google™

Figure A1

This screenshot shows the Google search engine (www.google.com), which is used to find other websites that have content you’re looking for. When you open your browser, you’ll probably see a different website at first, but don’t worry about this for now. Concentrate instead on the blue area at the top of the screen. These are your browser controls. The most important ones are:

• Address bar: This is where you type in the address of the website you’d like to visit. As you navigate through pages, you’ll see this bar change because every page on a website has its own unique address, also known as a URL. You can try it now by clicking on the address bar and then entering another address, such as www.bbc.co.uk for the BBC or www.tesco.com for Tesco. If you start typing a web address similar to one you’ve used before, the browser will suggest it so that you can click on it instead of having to type the rest of it. Web addresses always start with http:// or https:// (for a secure site) but the browser adds that for you automatically.

• Back button: Probably the most important button of all! Click this to go back, one page for each time you click it. If it’s not working, it’s probably because a link opened up in a new window. If you close that window, you should find your old session is still there in the original window you were using.

• Forward button: Use this button to go forward again after you’ve used the back button.

• Refresh button: click this to update the current webpage. This is useful for pages that change continuously.

• Stop button: use this to cancel downloading a page.

• Print: If you click this button, the webpage begins to print instantly, not always what you want. Click the triangle to the right of the printer and you can choose to preview the page first or set up your printer.

• Search box: You can type a subject in here to search the Web for webpages about it.

Those buttons are the gears and steering wheel, but there are some features that provide satnav, making it easier to get to the places you want to visit, and helping you to travel more quickly. Here are the highlights, which are also indicated on the previous screenshot:

• Favorites: Since the software is American, this feature is spelled that way. This button enables you to bookmark your favourite webpages, so you don’t have to type their address in when you want to visit them again. Click this button to open your favorites, which include any defaults provided by your computer manufacturer as well as any you’ve added. You can click these to go straight to the related webpage. After clicking the Favorites button, you can also click Add to Favorites to bookmark the current webpage, either in an existing folder, or in a new folder you create. The Favorites button also enables you to view your history of visited websites under the History tab.

• One-click favorites button: If you click this, a button to visit the current webpage is added immediately to the right of the button. This makes it easy to visit your regular online haunts in a single click. To get rid of a button again, right-click it and select delete.

• Home: This takes you to your browser’s start page. The default probably isn’t too helpful but you can change this to whatever you want so that you see the football news first thing or go straight into Facebook, for example. To do this, visit the page you’d like to start at and then go through the browser’s Tools menu (on the right hand side), and select Internet Options. In the Home page section at the top, click Use Current and then click OK. Whenever you open your browser in future, it starts at whatever webpage you’re looking at now.

• Empty tab: The browser uses a filing cabinet metaphor for organising different websites you’re using at the same time. You can select which webpage you want to see by clicking on the tab that sticks out the top of it. To open a new tab, click the empty tab. You can then enter a new website address into its address bar. To close a tab, just click it and then click the X that appears on the right side of the tab.

• Quick tabs button: If you have more than one tab open, click this to see a screenshot of all the current tabs at once. You can close any you don’t need any more by clicking the X above them.

• Compatibility button: If the text on a website overlaps or it otherwise doesn’t look right, try clicking this button. It tries to interpret webpages that don’t work because they haven’t had their design updated for the latest browser version. You only need to click once for each website; the browser remembers your setting. When compatibility mode is active, this icon goes blue.

Navigating websites

When you’re out walking somewhere unfamiliar you sometimes just make up your route as you go along. Perhaps you’ll see a sign to a river, and take a diversion along a different path to visit it. Or maybe you’ll see a sign for a short cut, so you’ll take that instead of retracing your steps home.

Navigating the Web is similar in that you find your way around it by surfing from webpage to webpage, following the signs. The signs, though, are called ‘links’. They form a connection from one webpage to another, so you can travel to a new webpage by clicking the link. Sometimes a linked webpage might be in a different part of the same website, and other times it is independent and unrelated, part of a different website completely.

The easiest links to spot are blue underlined text, which make up a large part of the Google homepage shown in Figure A1. If you click Language Tools, for example, you’ll be taken to a page of tools for translation and searching in foreign languages.

Links can be anything, though: the text isn’t always underlined, and even pictures can be links. If the website’s well designed, the links should be obvious at a glance. If not, you can check whether something is a link by moving your mouse over it. If your cursor turns into a hand, it’s a link. You’ll see its destination URL in the bottom left of the browser.

Take a look at the shopping site Amazon shown in Figure A2.

Amazon uses blue underlined text for some of its links, but it also uses images to help you navigate. You can click any of the product images, and can click the basket picture in the top right to see what you’re in the process of buying.

Reproduced by permission of Amazon.com, Inc

Figure A2

The main collection of links for getting around a website is known as a navigation bar, or navbar for short. Sometimes navbars change from screen to screen, but usually they’re consistent across the whole website, so you can more easily learn how to use the website. Each site designs its own navbar, so they all look different, but they usually run across the top of the screen or down the left-hand side.

Down the left hand side of the Amazon site is a list of all the different departments. When you hover the mouse cursor over one of them, some options pop out on the right, which you can then click, as shown in the screenshot in Figure A2. This is known as a pop-up menu and enables the website to provide lots of options for getting about the site without having to fill up the screen with all the links at once. It’s a widely used navigation technique, but sometimes you need to click on the navbar to get the submenu to appear.

On the right side, you’ll see a scrollbar. You’ve probably seen these used in office applications before; you click the bar, hold down the mouse button and slide the bar down the screen. It then scrolls the page so you can see what doesn’t fit on the screen at the moment. If your mouse has a scroll wheel between its buttons, you can just click an empty area at the top of the browser and then roll the scrollwheel to move the page up and down.

Using forms

Both the Google and Amazon websites use forms. These enable you to put your own information into the website, and play an important part in social networking.

On Google, for example, you can click the text box, type something you’re interested in there, and then click the Google Search button. On the Amazon website, you can click the empty box at the top of the screen, enter what you want to buy, and then click the round Go button to find relevant products.

Figure A3 is an overview of some of the most common controls you’ll come across, together with an example of how they might be used:

Visit www.sean.co.uk to try these form controls out for yourself

Figure A3

The forms sometimes look a bit different on different social networking sites. The buttons in particular are often redesigned. The most important thing to note is that you can only choose one option using radio buttons (the round ones), can choose multiple options using tickboxes, and have to click to open the options on a pulldown menu.

Making the Web easier to use

In the bottom right corner of the browser is a magnifying glass, which you can use to enlarge the tiny text that some web designers favour. Click this to cycle through zoom levels of 100%, 125% and 150%. Click the triangle next to it to select other zoom levels of up to 400%. You can also zoom by holding down the control key on the keyboard (marked CTRL) and rolling your mouse’s scrollwheel.

If you struggle to use a mouse, it’s possible to do most things using the keyboard, and even if you don’t, it’s sometimes quicker. Table A1 is a quick guide to some of the keyboard shortcuts that are available, many of which are shared by other browsers too. If you’d like to stick a copy on your noticeboard, visit www.sean.co.uk to print one.

Table A1 Keyboard shortcuts for Internet Explorer

Action	Keyboard shortcuts
Go to the address bar	F6, or ALT and D
Add www at the start and .com at the end of a website address. Enables you to just type Google, for example, and then use the shortcut.	CTRL and ENTER
Show the list of previously typed addresses, so you can pick one again	F4
Go to the search box	CTRL and E
Move through the buttons on the browser and the links on a webpage	TAB
Select a highlighted link or button	ENTER
Scroll down the page (slow)	DOWN
Scroll up the page (slow)	UP
Scroll down the page (fast)	Page Down (often on the number keypad)
Scroll up the page (fast)	Page Up (often on the number keypad)
Find a word in the webpage	CTRL and F. Use ENTER to move through the search results on the page
Back	ALT and LEFT
Forward	ALT and RIGHT
Refresh page	CTRL and F5
Stop downloading	ESC
Home	ALT and HOME
Add current page to favorites	CTRL and D
Open favorites	CTRL and I
Open history of visited websites	CTRL and H
Open new tab	CTRL and T
Close tab	CTRL and W
Go to next tab	CTRL and TAB
Zoom in	CTRL and +
Zoom out	CTRL and -
Zoom: reset to 100%	CTRL and 0
View webpage full screen (toggle on/off)	F11
Print	CTRL and P

Appendix B: Site directory

Now that you’re an expert on social networking, why not see what other sites are out there? You can use your experience creating profiles, finding friends and groups, and sharing your photos, words and wisdom.

This directory outlines some of the key sites dedicated to different interests. It couldn’t possibly be exhaustive: there are hundreds of networks out there. I’ve focused on those that add something different to the networks you’ve already read about in the body of this book, and I’ve focused on those that will provide a good welcome for older and wiser web users.

At the end of this directory, I’ve added a section about a website that can help you to cut the complexity of participating in several different social networks.

If there isn’t a network here to tickle your fancy, you can often find groups dedicated to interests like these at major social networks including Facebook (see Chapter 3), Meetup (Chapter 13) and Ning (Chapter 15).

Biography

43things.com

While many social networks help you share the details of daily life, 43Things is a place to take a step back and think about the bigger picture: what you are doing with your life, and what you want to do next. It’s where you share your life goals and receive support from others with similar aims. And as a member of the older and wiser generation, it’s where you can share your past achievements and advise others who aspire to achieve similar goals.

At 43Things everybody publishes a to-do list of things they want to achieve. You’re allowed to have any number of things on your list, up to a maximum of 43. Nobody knows why the limit is 43; it’s just a quirk of the website. As you make progress towards your goals, you can write about it on the site and seek advice from others on the next steps.

Visits to 43Things are inspiring. The site is full of people who are passionate about self-improvement, and about getting the best out of life. There are plenty of ideas for things that will make life simpler, more exciting, and more rewarding. People of all ages mingle on the site, from students who are contemplating their whole life beyond school, to mid-life career changers, and seniors with time to devote to their hobbies.

As Figure B1 shows, people are working together to complete a wide range of different goals.

Reproduced by permission of 43Things.com

Figure B1

Dandelife.com

Dandelife is like the Timeline feature in Friends Reunited, but it tends to be used for more in-depth diary-like posts describing key life events. It integrates with Flickr and Youtube, so that you can combine video and photos from those sites with your stories. All the content is public, but comments are only allowed from registered members. Membership numbers are fairly low, but if you want to create a blog or write your life story, this is a platform worth considering.

Books & reading

Goodreads.com

Goodreads is a social network for book fans. Readers create virtual shelves of books they’ve read, or books they’d like to read, and can add their own reviews and comments on them. The site has over 2.5 million members who have added over 60 million books to their shelves, so you’re sure to find somebody who can recommend something you’d like to read. More importantly, you can be alerted to reviews posted by your friends, which are likely to carry most weight with you.

Discussion groups centre on particular authors or genres, and you can also interact with authors who blog on the site.

Goodreads can update Twitter automatically with what you’re reading and can tell your Facebook friends about your updates on Goodreads. There is integration with MySpace too, and a widget you can use in your Ning pages.

This is the most vibrant community connecting readers and writers, but similar sites include Library Thing (www.librarything.com, with 850,000 members) and Shelfari (www.shelfari.com, which is owned by Amazon).

Business

Linkedin.com

Many people have an informal network of friends and colleagues they can consult when they have questions about work and their professional development. LinkedIn brings these loose connections to the internet and enables you to consult your trusted network, and tap into the networks of your friends. Using LinkedIn, you can find new suppliers, clients, projects, employees and employers. LinkedIn also enables you to share your professional experience and expertise with others worldwide.

There are no games on LinkedIn; it’s much more serious than Facebook or Friends Reunited. It is an ideal way to reconnect with former colleagues, and to collaborate with your social network on projects and professional development.

While there are some premium features on LinkedIn, you’ll find that you can do most things you want to using a free account.

Disability

Disaboom.com

Disaboom is a website that connects people living with disability and anyone else touched by disability including friends and family, and healthcare professionals. The site claims to have 180 million members, which would make it one of the largest social networks covered in this book. The forums are friendly places to go for advice or a laugh, and members can share their experiences in groups, blog posts, live chats and photos.

Gardening

Growsonyou.com

Growsonyou is a friendly and supportive community of gardeners who share their tips and advice through blogs and question and answer forums. The site has 9,000 members, three-quarters of whom are over 40 years old. 65% of the members are female.

Photo sharing and commenting is a key part of the site. Members uploaded over 80,000 photos in the site’s first two years. Growsonyou makes it easy to find pictures by colour or to find inspiring shots of small gardens, waterfalls or decking, among other design challenges.

The site is free to use. There is an optional garden supplies shop built-in.

Genealogy

Genesreunited.co.uk

Genesreunited is a sister site to Friends Reunited, dedicated to helping people to connect with their family members and create their family trees. The site has over 10.5 million members and enables you to search over 209 million names to see if your relations appear in other members’ family trees. If they do, you can contact the member who owns that tree to find out more and view their family tree. The community shares tips on genealogy research, and there is pay-per-view and subscription access to scanned census records.

The site enables you to add your relatives to a world map and import or export data in the standard Gedcom format used by genealogy software.

Geni.com

This site has over 70 million profiles and enables families to collaborate to build their family tree online. Families can share photos and videos and add events to a timeline or calendar. Using Geni is a bit like having your own Ning network: there’s no pre-built community for you because each family’s discussion is private to them, so you’ll need to invite others to join you if you’re the first in your family to discover the site. You can do most things with a free account, but paid accounts start at $5 per month and provide access to advanced search and family tree statistics and also enable you to collaborate with others on your family tree. You can kickstart your tree with a Gedcom file if you’ve already been creating your tree using genealogy software or on another site that exports in that format.

Myheritage.com

This site has one foot in the past and one foot in the present. While the family tree is a key feature, the real focus of the site is on creating a mini website for your family to keep in touch. You can share photos, videos, recipes, polls, links, family news, and events on the calendar. The site includes facial recognition software which aims to make it easier to tag people in photographs, and to find photos of your family uploaded by other members. Your family website can be private or public. During the registration, the site railroads you into downloading a toolbar so you have all its tools always available in your browser, but this is optional. Just close your browser windows, open them up again and log in to the site and you can bypass the toolbar installation.

Knitting and crochet

Ravelry.com

Ravelry has 372,000 members who knit, spin, crochet or design patterns. On the site, you can share your projects with others, search for patterns and seek and share advice on the best tools and techniques. You can add other members as friends, and can join groups dedicated to chatting, swapping or local meets. The forums cover patterns, techniques, yarn, and needlework on the net.

Languages

Italki.com

Practising with a native speaker is the best way to keep your fluency up in a foreign language, and can also be a friendly way to improve your language skills if you’re not yet fluent. Italki makes it easy for you to find study partners who are native speakers of the language you’re learning, and who would benefit from your native language (probably English, if you’re reading this).

Whatever you want to learn, you’re bound to find a partner here: The site has over 450,000 members from 212 countries, who speak over 100 languages.

As well as finding language partners, you can join or start discussion forums (in English, or a foreign language) and can pose or answer questions about language study. There’s a wiki for learning languages too, which is an encyclopaedia that anybody (including you) can edit. The ratings will help you to find the well researched and accurate entries. Don’t forget the contributions mostly come from other students and might occasionally include errors – don’t let their mistakes rub off on you!

Music

Last.fm

Last.fm is a site where music fans discuss their favourite artists and find others who share their tastes. There are groups where you can seek recommendations of new music to try, and Last.fm will itself analyse what you like and suggest new bands to you. If you listen to music on your computer, you can install software that keeps a record of what you play, which helps Last.fm create a personalised radio station you’ll enjoy. If you want to blog about music, Last.fm enables you to create what it calls a journal and receive comments from other site members. When you visit other members’ profiles, you can see how compatible your music tastes are, as Figure B2 shows:

Reproduced by permission of Last.fm Ltd

Figure B2

Best of all, Last.fm will create a chart showing what you and your groups listen to most. Ready, pop pickers? Not ‘arf!

MySpace.com

MySpace is the platform of choice for music fans and for musicians, both amateur and professional. Most big name acts have a presence there today, and new material is often released on the site first.

MySpace makes it easy to search for others in your age group, and to find new friends who are interested in friendship or dating. Bear in mind that many lie about their date of birth to protect their privacy, so the age displayed on a member’s profile might be misleading. Either that, or it’s the top hangout for young-looking septuagenarian dance music fans.

If you’re a musician, comedian or film-maker, you can create a free MySpace profile that helps to promote your work. Anybody is welcome to join, blog on the site, and connect with friends.

MySpace members are guaranteed at least one friend. Tom Anderson, the site’s co-founder, is automatically added to your friends list when you join up. Don’t expect to hear from him much, though. He has over 260 million friends. That illustrates the difference between online friends and real friends perfectly.

News and views

Reddit.com and Digg.com

These are sites where people can share links to interesting stuff they’ve found on the internet, and vote on the links they like. They enable members to decide what’s newsworthy, with the most popular links making it to the front pages. Each link has its own discussion thread, but the conversation can get rather fiery, particularly on political subjects on Digg. Discussions tend to focus on a single link, so there’s not much repeated interaction with people unless you happen to be commenting on the same links. If you find someone you like though, you can see what else they’ve posted and this can be a good way to discover new websites, articles and videos you want to see.

Photography

Flickr.com

Flickr is dedicated to sharing and discussing photos. Now that digital cameras are relatively cheap (and even incorporated into phones and other devices), we are probably living at the most photographed time in history. Flickr makes it easy to share your memories, creative works and observations of daily life.

Members can tag areas of an image to comment on, perhaps drawing attention to a detail you might not have noticed, or comment on the image as a whole. While there is a wealth of public photos there, you can also use Flickr to create private groups for sharing and discussing photos of family occasions. There are groups dedicated to different types of photography, such as nature.

Flickr has a simple tool called Picnik for rotating, cropping, and resizing photos and for fixing colours and red-eye.

Normally copyright law means you’re not allowed to republish someone else’s pictures, but many members of Flickr make their images available for free under a creative commons licence. That means you can take those images from Flickr, with the creators’ consent, and use them to decorate your profile or identify your group on other social networks.

Although most people access Flickr through its website, there are lots of different ways you can get photos in and out of Flickr. There is a Flickr application for Facebook, and a widget for Eons. You can customise your 43Things profile to display your photo stream in the sidebar. You can also add Flickr streams to your Ning social networks. For that reason, people often use Flickr as their main storage depot for photos, and let the images automatically flow from there into the other social networks they use.

Seniors

GrowingBolder.com

www.secondlife.com

Some users of Second Life play out entire fictional life stories in the virtual world, including starting a business, buying some land, building their dream home and settling down with another player in a virtual marriage. The experience can be incredibly immersive. Just don’t forget your first life!

Web surfing

Delicious.com

This site previously had the web address del.icio.us, but they have thankfully changed it to something we can all remember. Delicious enables you to share your web bookmarks online, and to find the websites that others are bookmarking. You describe sites using tags, short keywords of your own choice that summarise the content of a page. This site is best thought of as a people-powered search engine – it’s good for finding new content, but the focus is very much on the bookmarks, rather than the community of people posting them.

StumbleUpon.com

If you enjoy surfing the web, StumbleUpon can give you tailored recommendations of new sites you’ll enjoy. Members share their website bookmarks and reviews, and can give each webpage a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. StumbleUpon works out a member’s taste based on these ratings, and uses it to recommend websites that others with similar taste liked. It’s a bit like Amazon’s ‘customers who bought this book, also bought this book’ feature, only it’s for website visits. There’s a toolbar you can download, so you can give the thumbs up (or down) to any webpages you come across and stumble onto a new recommendation with a single click.

The site has over seven million members and has hundreds of different categories of website that you can express a preference for, when you register. These include home brewing, cats, lounge music, fishing, politics, weight loss, and rugby – there’s something for everyone.

Integrating different social networks

Ping.fm

You probably want to go where your different groups of friends and favourite communities congregate, so that might mean using different networks at the same time. How can you manage the complexity of participating in multiple social networks? Ping.fm makes it easy to update different social networks with the same content, using a single interface.

At Ping.fm, you register your account details for major social networking sites. When you add text or photos to Ping, it then logs into your accounts and adds that content to your profiles for you.

While it doesn’t support every site (Eons and Saga Zone are excluded, for example), it does include most mainstream social networks. Of those covered in this book, Ping.fm can post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Delicious, and Flickr.