It's a Status Thing

The notion of privacy almost seems quaint in the hyper-connected world of social networks, and maintaining the right balance of exposure and anonymity is a tricky combination of art and science. A prudent Facebooker, for instance, will typically want to customize his or her privacy settings for news feeds in order to control what types of stories get published, particularly those relating to changes in relationship status.

Sansserif and I have blogged extensively on this in the past, discussing the varying degrees of seriousness of a particular relationship status, the pitfalls of publicly changing said status, and the sudden ripples that can occur from abrupt transitions between, say, "single" and "married." Indeed, cautionary tales abound on why taking the time to tweak a privacy setting or two is probably a good idea.

Such controls are good for everyday life, but what happens when you want to spread the word far and wide? Well...

...Sansserif and I recently announced our engagement. After telling our families and a handful of close friends, we decided we were ready to go Facebook Official about our big change in status. In our excitement, however, we neglected to make sure our privacy protections were turned off so that word would quickly travel to news feeds far and wide. It took a day of puzzling silence on the airwaves for us to realize our error, whereupon we changed status back to "in a relationship," turned the news feed announcements back on, and got Facebook Official all over again.

Curiously, all of the comments that flooded in after our second announcement appear only on my wall, which strikes me as somewhat old fashioned for a progressive social network like Facebook. I mean, just because we're getting married, does that really mean we have to forfeit our individual comment threads? It seems to be an obvious breach of Netiquette.

Despite the pitfalls of controlling the flow information in your news feed, maintaining an active stance on privacy is still a good idea, especially when the relationship waters run the other way. Consider, for instance, Prince Harry's breakup with longtime girlfriend Chelsy Davy, which only became official when the media discovered her change of Facebook status. Then there was the recent case of Burger King's "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign in which Facebook users were offered a free hamburger for publicly dumping ten of their friends (the program was axed after ending a mere 234,000 friendships).

All I know is that once Sansserif and I set an official wedding date, I'm going to make a pop-up reminder in our shared Google Calendar to change our privacy settings well in advance. After all, when it comes to announcing the big "M" on Facebook, you only get one chance to do it right!