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Facebook as a giant relationship gossip feed

Lots of comments on realtionship changes
Lots of comments on relationship changes

I was looking at my Facebook feed today as a pattern suddenly occurred to me. From all the things people post to their account or change, almost the only one that consistently gets at least one comment from someone is when they change relationship status to a lower level. Going from married to single or declaring that it’s complicated.

A few months ago I speculated that it’s unfortunate that Facebook doesn’t allow you publicly lose a friend, but luckily enough it allows you to publicly dump someone.

As evidence I present this nice rendering of my Facebook time line of today.

I’m going to be short today and spare a lenghty rant about the importance of relationships in human society.

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2 responses to “Facebook as a giant relationship gossip feed

  1. Your going to be pretty bored with me as a facebook friend then. I’ve been married 11 years and have no intentions of changing status for a while.

    It be more interesting to see the comments you can’t see (ie private messages) following a status change, ie how many friends sends other friends private messages about the status change, ie he deserves it, or knew she’s dump him, or he’s free etc.

    not sure i’d like all friends status changes to be public though, i have 217 friends now and occasionally have to cull them to a managable number, not sure i’d want people to know i’d done that it might seem a bit rude, even if i don’t know them that well.

  2. Just lurking on Facebook and using some other features is also fun.

    you can trim down the noise considerable in the new Facebook design as you can mute things from your friends, set how much certain information you want to see in your timeline and of course blog apps. This actually make the whole experience manageable even with large amounts of friends.

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