The home page is AMAZING, Nikki. It will show up-to-the-minute updates on all your friends: their status update changes, their new pictures, their comments on their friends' walls, recent activity on your wall, etc. The sidebar on the home page shows when you have a friend whose birthday is coming up i.e. mine was this past Mon, and I easily got more than 40+ 'Happy birthday!' posts to my Wall & I am under no delusion that this many people remembered my bday on their own.
Your profile/wall page is just like having a blog. People can leave you comments, and on THAT page, everything that happens to your personal profile and/or that you do will show up: when someone leaves you a comment on your wall, when someone leaves you a comment on a picture, when you change your status update (and people can leave you a comment underneath each update if they so choose), when you become friends with someone, when you leave a comment on someone else's page and/or photo.
I know it sounds confusing NOW, but it really isn't. It's just more instant gratification & I know you like that since you digitally scrap. Instead of having to come here & read every indiv thread or skip around to 10-15 blogs or have 5 different IM conversations... it's all right there. You can know in an instant what your friends are up to. You can even set it up to send alerts to your cell phone and you can update your status from your cell phone if you want.
Make sure you go to Settings --> Account Settings --> Notifications. This way, you can manage when you get an email from the site alerting you to something happening. For instance, I have mine set up so that I receive an email when someone comments on my wall or sends a message to my inbox, but I do NOT receive an email if someone accepts my friend request or leaves a comment after me on someone else's photo/wall. There's a whole list, so scroll through them all and see what you want to do. This will eliminate you going crazy if the default is to receive emails after anything happens, and then you have to wade through 20+ emails every day from Facebook.
Do this also with your Privacy settings. You can have your profile set up so anyone in one of your networks (geographical area, college, etc.) can see it or just your friends that you accept or some other combination.
This is important because anything you post on Facebook is public and can be seen by all sorts of people you may not know. Like I said, I can go to my home page and see what one of my friends has posted to someone else's wall. There's even a linky-loo once you go to that page that's called 'Wall to Wall' which brings up the entire conversation between two people without needing to scroll/tab back and forth between pages. A busybody's dream.
The two things that ARE private is sending someone a message that will go to their inbox AND real time Facebook chat which you can access at the lower right of your Facebook screen.
HTH! Have fun!! FB is the best!
