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Dan Tero

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The Web Business of Breaking Up

Facebook can be a lousy date. Nearly a month after Microsoft slipped Mark Zuckerberg's "social graph" $240 million for a pocket-sized 1.6% stake, the network unleashed an advertising platform that spread users' personal information like a loose-lipped lover. As newly four-year-old Facebook moves into its next stage in development, it awkwardly navigates its status as a third wheel with a penchant for tittle-tattle.

Sometimes, things go wrong. For example, meddling Facebook ended Thomas Crampton's engagement. When the international tech journalist and his fiancé, Thuy-Tien Tran, wanted to make their "personal lives a little more private," the happily engaged couple removed their relationship status from their profiles. Jumping to conclusions, Facebook's News Feed quickly alerted their social network that the engagement was off, and the condolences started pouring in.

Even before social networks were born, says John Michael Norvell, an anthropologist on Harvard's campus, "people had ways of telegraphing their status." While Facebook invented neither unions, nor breakups, nor the gossip that surrounds them, Norvell claims the site makes chatter faster and more public -- two aspects that may have an impact on interpersonal relations. In fact, one of Norvell's students recently alerted him that other women's whispers on her boyfriend's Wall were "damaging her relationship." Ultimately, the coed kept her companion and dumped Facebook.

Why would a social networking site track users' relationship statuses? "It's a huge market," says Nicky Grist, executive director of nonprofit The Alternatives to Marriage Project. Due to longer life expectancies, increasing divorce rates, delayed onset of first marriage, as well as laws barring same-sex marriage, the singles population has exploded. With 92 million Americans swinging solo, Grist suggests social networks collecting users' marital status have information companies may potentially consider valuable. Facebook admits it divulges to marketers "insights into people's activity." WooMe, a fast-growing online dating space, is one of the site's bedfellows.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, one out of every three Americans knows someone who found dates via the computer. Additionally, 30 million adults have acquaintances that unearthed long-term partners or spouses by looking for love in all the online places. But Facebook isn't a fix-up spot. Or, is it?

"Find old friends, meet people, date," beckons the advanced search application's tagline. Singles use the tool to scan profiles in their region and keystroke their way to a rendezvous or two. Already hitched? Coupled partners list their significant others online to make it Facebook official. John Norvell hears the starry-eyed adage that "a relationship or a breakup isn't official until you see it on Facebook" quite frequently. If swapped varsity jackets and pins signposted yesteryear's couplings, Facebook is the new romance officiant. Love life buzz is available on the site to anyone with eyeballs that see and fingers that type.