I'm back in the closet on Facebook

At almost exactly the same moment as it happened to Dave, Facebook suddenly exploded into my inbox from several directions, with a plethora of invites from ex-colleagues, friends and family. As a consequence I thought I ought to set up my page properly.

I couldn't really imagine that I'd use it very much, and I expect it will languish unloved like my Vox or my MySpace profiles. Though I did at least try out Vox long enough to publish some of my music on the site.

So, I was quite surprised to get a private message through the Facebook system from one of my friends saying:

"According to your profile on here, you're homosexual"

A quick look at my profile revealed it to be true - there I was on Facebook, married and interested in men - a situation which thanks to the successful liberalisation of marriage laws in some places in the world, is not as mutually exclusive as people used to claim.

So I immediately investigated how this had happened. After all, this was bound to be the result of some kind of usability flaw with a service that only recently opened their doors to all-comers. It was certainly going to be worth blogging about what must be a problem with Facebook's profile setting forms.

So I went to edit my profile.

Ah - that all seems pretty straightforward actually. It turns out to have been simple operator error on my part.

Of course, my wife was surprised by the whole affair.

But not as surprised as she was that when I told Facebook I was married to someone with her name, it offered me a list of totally different girls I could choose to pick as my Facebook spouse.

Posted by Martin Belam, May 4, 2007
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