RelationshipBook: For the couples you already know everything about

I've frequently been of the gooseberry disposition.

Dinners, parties, luncheons, when you might as well have a kitten purse for all the help it would do you in remaining invisible amongst all the couples.

These days  my relationship status is 'in a relationship'.

'In a relationship's not quite good enough now, though, for my time in life. 'Not married, then?' is the suffix to 'in a relationship' when you're in your 30s and we all know it.

Online you'd be scouring my photos to see if I was, at least, a mother. Perhaps a knowing smile if I'd had one out of wedlock - got my number.

It's hard to escape the judgement, these days. Keeping off the web is pretty tough, especially as a digital journalist who is expected to be leading strategy on the very platforms which tell you all you'd ever need to know about me.

And now Facebook launches, for want of a better phrase, RelationshipBook. Not satisfied with unabashedly asking as to my relationship status, there's now a place for my partner and I to house all our most intimate keep sakes - holiday photos, corny messages, winks, pokes, worse...

I can see the couples this will appeal to - those who regularly post to their boyfriends wall '12 weeks and counting! I love you more than ever, cuddlemonster! xxxx'. The couples who Facebook each other while sitting on different sofas in the same room. Those for whom their love knows no bounds. Or should we say boundaries.

I'm rather pleased that this one I'll be forced to sit out, for my boyfriend is a rare new-age creature who isn't even registered on Facebook.

He does, however, bookmark twitter steams, which still confuses me. Still - each to their own. If I even so much as suggested a RelationshipBook he'd throw his designy-crayons at me (probably Pantone).

I appear to have accidentally, and thankfully, dodged a digital bullet...

Marketing in a social environment

With the arrival of frictionless apps from Facebook it seems the line between private, social and professional life has finally and irreparably been blurred.

Facebook used to live under strict rules akin to Google+ - no business need apply. In fact, if they found out you were a business with a profile page they'd suspend your account.

Then came targeted ads - remember those? It would announce what you just bought on amazon and target similar products to your friends. Well, we rebelled and Facebook tucked its tail between its legs and scampered off to think again.

Finally pages arrived and we all jumped right on board. Newfeeds became an amalgamation of what colour your mate’s bra was followed by what special offer dominos had on that night, followed by what the current situation in the West Bank was...

And it worked.



In choosing to allow which organisation can sneak into our life on Facebook we accept that marketing and information dissemination from news agencies, corporate conglomerates and PR agencies might actually occasionally be of interest, nay of use to us.

With frictionless apps we can take it to the next level and not even have to leave the blue and white platform to take in every aspect of online existence. Scary? Or clever? Or both?

I fear until Google+ catches up it might simply limp along behind Zuckerberg’s online ‘social’ giant.