March 14th, 2010

new relating rules in the social media age

» Posted in Love, Matchmaking, Relationships, online dating, social networks at 9:38 pm

the relating rules have changed in this new age of social media and sometimes its hard to keep up with them. How does the new relating landscape look & what do we need to be aware of now when starting or finishing relationships? Online dating has changed dramatically in the last 3 or 4 years as social media sites have become ever more popular. As a lot of dating sites often only pay lip service to helping you find a match, users can now take this process into their own hands, thanks to social media sites. There people can meet freely and get to know each other through every day actions & words (status updates).

I read a RedEye post Online Dating 2.0: They met on Twitter – RedEye By Leonor Vivanco which leads in with the story about a couple who met through Twitter. This is a really positive example and it highlights the opportunities that are available for meeting people through mobile social media.

Today, daters have an alternative–or supplement–to traditional online dating sites such as eHarmony or match.com. They are entering a new frontier of digital dating equipped with a slew of Facebook and iPhone applications coupled with mobile Web sites. But dating experts question whether such technology is a romance killer and whether it can lead to anything more than a hookup.

Of course the other side of this equation is that social media tools are now often involved in the mixups & breakups of relationships today. Reuters in Her Facebook status changed to “single?” Ur dumped quotes some stats:

Over one third of 2,000 people polled (34 percent) said they had ended a relationship by email, 13 percent had changed their status on Facebook without telling their partners and six percent had released the news unilaterally on Twitter. By contrast, only two percent had broken up via a mobile phone text. The rest had split up the old-fashioned way by face-to-face conversation (38 percent) and by telephone (eight percent).

Ars Technica has a post with points that need to be addressed now with the new social media rules titled How to break up in an online world—and avoid e-stalkers By Jacqui Cheng. They list as follows:

Change all your passwords

Unfriend

Make all your stuff private

Twitter; protect your tweets

Facebook: every way to control the privacy of your account

Flickr

There are some things about a breakup that you can’t really control on the Internet—there’s no way to go back in time and make sure he or she doesn’t have copies of you buck nekkid, for example. However, you can control how much your ex knows about what you’re up to now. Sure, there are many instances in which people break up and someone isn’t trying to ruin the other’s life, but if you find yourself in that position, these are some of the easiest steps you can take.

In a New York Times post Breaking Up in a Digital Fishbowl By LAURA M. HOLSON there is further advice:

Randall Kessler, a lawyer in Atlanta, said he advises divorcing clients to change their passwords, stop posting on social networking sites, acquire a new e-mail address, and secure or make copies of whatever is posted about them online. Users, of course, control what they post on private accounts. Where it gets tricky, though, is when photos, videos and comments have been forwarded, retweeted or reposted to friends’ accounts or on public Web sites.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of Loopt, a mobile tracking service that allows users to monitor friends’ locations using the G.P.S. software on their cellphones, said he was seeing social mores shift firsthand. About 20 percent of Loopt’s users are couples who buy the service to keep track of each other’s whereabouts. But in the past six months, there has been an increase in the number of customers who use fake locations as a decoy so a person doesn’t know where they are, Mr. Altman said, a service that Loopt offers.

“It’s hard to figure out the middle ground,” Ms. Che said. “The thing is you never really get out of the relationship.” Ms. Perle of Common Sense Media told the story of a friend, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who broke up recently. Her dilemma was different from Ms. Spencer’s: She wanted to sever ties with the man but not with his children. So she defriended him while remaining friends on Facebook with his children.

Still, photographs of the couple during happier days abound online. “These pictures travel,” said Ms. Perle, as she recently clicked through a Web slideshow of the couple. “You have no control once they are integrated into other people’s pages.”

In other words, she added, “you cannot de-boyfriend yourself.”

Do you have a funny or heart breaking story about starting or finishing a relationship with social media? Let me know in the comments below. Some people take it a little too far, even at the altar. Check out this video…