I want this New Years' Eve to be one to remember, so I've been thinking about how to invite all my friends to a giant New Years' Eve party. Currently, I have 2,226 friends on Facebook, so I need to do something special.

First, the little house we're renting just isn't big enough for 2,226 people to come to, even if they come at different times. So, I needed to find some other party worth going to and worth inviting all my friends.

The Community Health Center where I work is a lead sponsor of Middnight on Main, a large First Night style New Years' Eve event in Middletown, CT. There are a lot of great acts and events that will be there.

As the Social Media Manager for CHC, I'm helping get the word out on Facebook and and Facebook has been particularly interesting.

While there are many different events that will take place at Middnight on Main, we decided to create one large overarching event for the whole evening. The question becomes, how do we invite everyone.

I could go through and click on each friend, one after another, but with 2,226 friends, that would take a while. However, there are people who have written about how to invite all your friends at once. This blog post is one of the better descriptions of the process. I've tested it in Chrome and Safari and it has worked for me, with a few special things to note.

First, it is based on Javascript, so you need to make sure you have Javascript enabled when you do this. If you are using Chrome, you need to make sure that 'javascript:' is at the start of the address line before you hit enter, or that you've turned off searching from the address bar. Otherwise, it will search for that phrase out on the web, instead of selecting all your friends.

Also, as noted in the updates, be sure to scroll down to the end of your friends list before running the script. Otherwise, it will only get the first fifty to one hundred friends.

The next thing to note. Since this is an event in Connecticut, it probably doesn't make sense to invite many of my international friends. I did invite some while I was testing, and others because I figured they would do a good job of helping spread the word. However, I really wanted to target the invitation to all of my local friends.

This is really fairly simple if you've started playing with lists. I've not been all that impressed with lists, so far. However, if you go to invite friends and click on Search By Name, you get the ability to select people in various lists. When you have the list up, you can run the same Javascript to invite just the people in that list.

Since I haven't done a lot with lists, my lists aren't still all that great, but I used this to invite a bunch of people that I thought would be interested, and for some lists, adding a special message to target my invitation.