By John D. Sutter
(CNN) — 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 http://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.”
The-CNN-Wire/Atlanta
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