Posting baby details to Facebook
Note: This post is not meant to pick on any one person or any of my specific Facebook friends. I consider telling new parents anything negative about their behavior or children tasteless and counter productive. If you have recently had children and fit into the stereotype portrayed in this post please try not to take it personally.
**Rant warning**
I'm probably going to get a ton of flak for saying this but it needs to be said and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone:
Pictures of three second old infants coated in leftover after birth are best left out of public Facebook posts, as are "Precious pumpkin had their millionth poopie related accident" stories.
Some people probably care. Some of your good friends and immediate family may want to hear about every turn in your journey through parenthood.
The truth is: Most people, maybe even your close friends with children of their own, find the thought of this type of information absolutely disgusting.
I'm not talking about regular baby pictures or school related announcements, I'm specifically talking about the really knarly stuff. Basically anything involving bodily fluids or feces.
Many parents spend large portions of their children's years hoping for a break in the soul crushing monotony of child rearing. Are your offspring's first bowel movements and the dynamics of public vomiting what you want to remember when they are (hopefully) off to college? Are these the things by which you want your friends who aren't around every day to remember Junior? Imagine this conversation happening at every family holiday in perpetuity: "Hey <16 year old progeny of my cousin> I don't have anything age appropriate to use for small talk so how about I bring up <embarrassing story your unthinking parents have forever etched in my memory>?" That'll teach your kid to bring his girlfriend to witness the annual humiliation we call family gatherings. If these aren't the types of things that you want to define parenthood then why do you record them as such?
What happened to stories from U-6 soccer or t-ball games, school photos or other ways humans use to mark and communicate the maturation process? At least those are circumstances with which almost everyone can identify (no placenta required).
Chances are that your single and childless friends are at least disinterested and may even be revolted to read your "Little Johny figured out how to pee on me from across the room" stories, especially bright and early on Monday morning. I realize that the number of your friends in this category probably decreases with time but so does your propensity for posting baby pictures (all three parties eventually grow up). Similarly someone who isn't wearing your expectant mother goggles couldn't for a thousand dollars discern anything from the blob your doctor has convinced you is a hand in the fuzzy sonogram you posted last week. Considering posting daily updates about your fetus? Go ahead and try reading that aloud to yourself while substituting an acquaintance's name for yours, not nearly as endearing as you'd hoped? GOOD, STOP POSTING!
Oh and don't even get me started if your "promotion" to parent status was unplanned. I refuse to give you a pat on the head for simply completing your biological imperative.
I've been talking for years about how to use Facebook to screen out pictures of distended uteruses, infant poop reports and "we're pregnant" posts from male friends. Hint: if you aren't the one carrying a human in your womb you aren't pregnant. (Side note: men should always come up negative if they take the urine pregnancy test, if you are XY and come up positive go get checked out, also I'm pretty sure you can come up with something more interesting to pee on in the bathroom.) Other than unfriending anyone who has posted unreasonably intimate baby details or meticulously removing their posts from my feed I've yet to come up with a built in solution.
/Rant
So here is what I consider a genuine opportunity to create a Facebook application everyone can find useful:
Facebook should create groups or profiles for common types of people. These groups should be transparent to the users so they don't actually have to join anything, the Facebook team probably already does this type of thing to target advertisements. These groups should represent common demographics, some good examples might be "Minors", "Techies" and of course "Single with no Children". Facebook could then use internal information to get a good idea of what groups a member may belong to. Using things like age, post frequency, keywords and relationship status they could get a good idea of what each individual is interested in.
Facebook should then create a feature (or an app) to mark posts as belonging to certain themes that coincide to the groups mentioned above. A baby related post that is marked as such may get a cute pacifier or a set of balloons or whatever Zynga/Farmville themed avatar that is appropriate. Tech related posts may get black background and green font formatting, adult themed posts could get a 18+ warning, etc.. People can mark their own posts at the time of creation or their friends can mark them, this mechanism works much like tagging a photo with the names of your friends.
Then when someone sees something objectionable in their feed (my fraternity friends probably don't want to read my latest code signing howto) they can opt out of the group that the post in question belongs to. After a few users mark my posts Facebook should have a good idea of who else may or may not be interested in their content. Facebook could even create different types of news feeds based on these transparent groups and auto tag posts (like how Digg has "All Topics", "Business", etc). This way family or other new parents can get information about the gritty details of raising "your precious little angel" and you don't have to read my monospace code fury (how many of you actually care about perl -pe -i 's/\cM//')
