Lately Dave, David, Doc, and Maggi (and I’m sure, many others) have all lamented some of the oddities of Facebook (and danah has posted a trenchant class-structure analysis). In the age of folksonomies, why can’t Facebook offer a starting set of obvious relationships, and allow users to create their own tags for others? I’m still stumped that I can’t have “married” be my relationship with Margaret, and my students and I have to go through contortions to indicate that I was their seminary teacher; if you turned the power of tagging loose on Facebook relationships, you could clean this up in a flash.
Nate showed me how to be married to Margaret in Facebook — not in the “how do you know her” dialogue, but in the “married” status entry. But since Margaret didn’t have a Facebook entry when I made my page, that wasn’t in any way obvious; once she made a page, I added her as a “friend” (I hope I’m not overstating things in that regard), but I couldn’t identify her as my spouse in that process.