It's easy to invite new friends to shouldi or connect with friends who are already on shouldi. Once you have logged into shouldi, just click on the invite a friend button from the shouldi home page or your my shouldi page. This action will take you to the invitations page where you can enter multiple phone numbers, email addresses or shouldi user names for those that you want to invite to be your friends.

You can also personalize your invitation.

You have to log in to invite friends to connect with you. There are two ways to connect with friends on shouldi. First, from their personal page (you get their by clicking on the user's name or image), you can click on the invite to be a friend button under their image.

Second, you can click on the invite a friend button from the shouldi home page or your myshouldi page. This action will take you to the invitations page where you can enter up to ten shouldi user names that you want to invite to be friends.

Friends are other shouldi users that you who have accepted your invitiation to be a friend or who have invited you to be a friend. You can invite friends by clicking on the invite a friend button on most shouldi pages. Friends can see and offer advice for both your public and private shouldis. Friends will receive notifications either by e-mail, mobile messaging, or IM whenever you post a new shouldi.

Watchers are other shouldi users that think you are really interesting and have asked be notified when you post a new public shouldi or offer advice to other public shouldis. Watchers can only see your public activity just like anyone else. They can't see anything you do that is private or respond to your private shouldis. They just think you're cool and what an easy way to keep up with your public activities.

Go to the relationships tab under your user profile. You can see friend invitations awaiting your approval, friends invitations you've sent awaiting their approval, your current friends, and the people you are watching.

You will also get notifications from shouldi when other users add you as a friend or add you to their watch list.

That depends. Some shouldis are private. Only you and your friends can see and respond to these shouldis.

Other shouldis are public. The whole world can see these shouldis.

You can choose whether you want all your shouldis to be visible to the world or just your friends in the communications tab of your user profile. You can change these settings for a particular shouldi by choosing whether to ask the world or just your friends under the show options link of that shouldi.

It means that someone thinks you're interesting and wants an easy way to keep up on your public shouldis and answers. Watchers don't get any special access to you or your private information. They can only see your public activity just like anyone else. The advantage to watching someone is that we can notify you via email, IM, or phone when they do something public. It's really just a time saver and a way to tell someone that you think they're interesting.

The easiest way to find interesting shouldis, advice, and other shouldi users is to click the heart button in the center section of the shouldi home page or your my shouldi page.

The heart button gives you a quick and easy way of finding shouldis and other shouldi users that match the interests you summarized in your user profile. When you click on this button, shouldi returns any shouldis, advice responses, or user profiles that match any of your interests. For example, if you included poker, sea kayaking, and reggae as your interests, we'd return shouldis, advice, and user profiles that included any of these words or phrases.

You can also look for the "alike, near, new" box on the side of many pages. It will show you a random set of users (other than your friends) who share your interests or who live close to you.

Yes, but the other shouldi user must have selected the "allow private advice requests" option under the communications notifications settings of their user profile. When the other user has enabled private advice requests, you will see an "ask me about" link when you click on their picture or name. Just click on this link, fill out your message, and hit send.

There is an option to send a copy of this message to yourself also. By the way, if you want them to be able to send you a private message, then you also have to click "allow private advice requests". If you don't and you send a private message anyway, we'll give you a chance to turn it on.