Facebook whispers

Haha one of my friends has just experienced the scary gossip-monger effect that is generated via Facebook. Having decided to whittle down the personal details on his Facebook profile, he removed his declaration of singledom - and promptly activated a chain of messages from inquisitive friends speculating on who the lucky girl was. Oddly, as he pointed out, his removal of his political alignment and religious views didn't quite generate the same effect.

I fell prey to the same 'Facebook whispers' (my coining) phenomenum at the beginning of last year when, three months after I joined Facebook, I decided that actually, I didn't want everyone to be party to so much personal information. Being a relative late-comer to the world of Facebook, I hadn't realised how much store people put into the changes of status made to your profile. Hours after removing the information that I was 'in a relationship', I received several messages and phone calls from friends commiserating on my broken heart. As my heart wasn't, in fact, broken (at least, not yet) I was a bit bemused.
Funnily, a few months after this event, a high-school friend of mine left a message on my Facebook wall, jokingly asking when I was going to get married. Despite deleting the message as soon as I saw it, I was obviously too slow to stop the gossip-chain, as someone else wrote 'what, you're engaged?!!' on my wall. That took a few days to resolve. ('The Wall', for the uninitiated, being the electronic equivalent of a notice-board where other people can read the messages left on it).

Anyway, the moral of the story is, at least for me anyway, to use Facebook with care. Some of my friends don't use Facebook, for various reasons, many concerning privacy and data protection issues. Fair enough. I still use it, but I minimise what details I put on my profile and only fill in forms with basic information which is easy to obtain from other sources anyway.
The good thing is, any gossip dies down quite soon, because someone else in your network of friends inevitably falls foul of the gossip-mongers and Facebook stalkers fairly quickly. It's the online equivalent of the trashy tabloids.