Are you "in a relationship" on Facebook? If so, you might wish to go to this link: Facebook.com/us.
The page is the newly
launched digital version of the relationship between you and your
significant other, including posts, events and photos that both of you
are tagged in.
Cute, right? Well, not so much, according to the (always cheery) Internet.
"I want to vomit," wrote blogger Jennifer Wright.
Emma Barnett, women's editor at The Telegraph, wrote that she may break up with her husband on Facebook just to get rid of the newly created couple's page.
"Mr. Zuckerberg: by all
means keep giving people new tools -- as you did when you created
Facebook," she wrote, referring to Facebook's co-founder, Mark
Zuckerberg. "But when you start doing things for us -- the experience is
anything but social or remotely positive. You have infantilised my
relationship for me with the creation of www.facebook.com/us. Only I
should get to do that."
A little history makes this seem a bit less dramatic.
Facebook Friendship Pages, which show posts that you and a friend have in common, have existed for more than two years.
So there likely already was a "friendship" page between you and the person who you are "in a relationship" with on the billion-person social network. The main change is that now there is an Internet address -- facebook.com/us -- that redirects to your relationship.
Additionally, all of
those Friendship and Relationship pages, starting last Thursday, are
being updated to look more like Facebook's Timeline. They're more visual
than the old pages.
To see the Facebook
version of a friendship with someone in your network, go to their page
and click the gear icon at the top right of the page. Click "see
friendship."
On his blog, writer Justin McLachlan says the changes should be celebrated.
"There's nothing creepy here, that I can see, just more out of proportion reactions to something new, different and innovative," he wrote in response to The Telegraph's article. "It's no different, really, than typing your name into Google and seeing your face and other personal details from social networks mashed up in sidebar."
If you love someone on
Facebook but don't love the new Facebook.com/us pages, here's more news,
however, that might bother you: It's impossible to get rid of them.
You can, however, have a say in what content appears on them.
"You cannot deactivate the pages, but you can control what you share on Facebook using the privacy settings for each post,"
Facebook's Jessie Baker wrote in an
e-mail to CNN. "The friendship page respects the privacy setting of each
post. This means the person viewing the friendship page may see each
post elsewhere on Facebook, like on either friend's timeline or in news
feed. You can curate your friendship page by hiding stories you do not
want to appear.
"As a reminder, selecting to 'hide' an object from your timeline or friendship page does not remove it from Facebook, and the object may show up in other places such as news feed. If you would like to remove a story you posted from Facebook altogether, you can do so by selecting delete post or untagging yourself from photos."
