3pointD.com

There’s a nice piece in the Columbia Spectator titled “Facebook Official,” all about how the “Relationship Status” field on Facebook profiles is affecting users’ offline relationships. This is another good example (see this earlier example) of how small things in software design can have larger social reverberations for the people who are using the tools.

The writer, Miriam Datskovsky, quotes the Urban Dictionary definition of the term:

Facebook Official
The ultimate definition of a college relationship - when on one’s facebook profile it says “In A Relationship” and your significant other’s name.

“are adam and courtney dating?”
“i don’t know, they’re not facebook official yet.”

Datskovsky addresses Facebook’s creator directly:

Newsflash, Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t care how many million dollars you’re worth. Figuring out a relationship’s status was hard enough before Facebook. What happens when your significant other requests to be in a Facebook relationship without asking you about it beforehand? Breaking up with someone is plenty depressing sans having to click that ugly “cancel relationship” link (fun fact: the html tag for “cancel relationship” is “breakup”).

Her conclusion? That layering a Facebook relationship on top of a real one does not actually enhance the experience of hooking up, being in love, or even simply knocking boots. What it does is force Facebook users to pigeonhole an already complicated relationship — complicated by definition, given age, position in life, and level of hormones — often engendering even more tension than the relationship itself is probably generating on its own. Datskovsky: “While I sincerely appreciate all the procrastination benefits Facebook provides, I could do without the overly public strain it places on our sex lives.”

This is a direct result of what sounds like a poorly thought-out solution to a problem that didn’t really exist in the first place. But there’s a larger point to be made: simply providing any kind of entry field at all for “Relationship Status” in a public Facebook profile forces users to focus on an aspect of their lives they may not want to publicly focus on at all. But if you’re in Facebook, you have a Facebook relationship status — whether or not it matches up with your offline situation.

Would it have been better to leave out Relationship Status altogether? I don’t know. It would be nice if users could opt out of having that field show up on their profiles. (I don’t know if this is possible, actually, since I’ve never had a university email address and so can’t register at Facebook, but I tend to doubt it.) In any case, it’s worth noting how a tool designed to create connections may be making some of those connections more difficult. Progress stumbles on.