Facebook Making Users Designate Their Gender
Gender has long been optional for Facebookers. Those who'd rather be a little mysterious could just leave gender as unspecified and let people take a guess based on a profile picture (assuming one was provided). Unfortunately, that resulted in some vague automated status updates from the site, with everyone updating information about themself -- a word that isn't exactly grammar-friendly. Now Facebook is taking the step to start requiring that users designate their gender on profiles, so that users will now be updating the grammatically correct himself or herself.Facebook has long had issues with the English language. Status updates, one of the cornerstones of the online community, were for years completely grammar challenged. With a status update, you can tell your friends exactly what you're doing at the moment. Until recently, however, you were required to start your update with the word is, occasionally leading to some curious sentences like "Tim is just got back from work." The required word is was dropped a few months back and now, with this gender requirement, another sore spot among grammar freaks will be gone.
Fear not; if you really don't want to be referred to as "him" or "her," you'll still be able to remove all notions of gender from your profile if you wish, though how exactly this will be implemented remains to be seen. [Source: CNN]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nat @ Jul 17th 2008 4:15PM
Is there going to be an 'unknown' or 'unsure' option. Sounds like this may cause a few lgbt problems (particularly t).