Facebook quietly rolled out its latest technological advancement just last week, and not everyone is on board with the site’s new pregnancy-status feature. The social networking site’s latest application allows expectant parents to announce their baby news via a new option under “Friends and Family” that would list future family members under “Expected: Child.” Continue reading after the jump.
Word of the Facebook feature has meandered over to Twitter, and critics of it argue that the concept is “creepy” and “too much.”
“What’s next, conception planning dates?” one user quipped.
“The feature makes it a very clinical way to share what some consider very sacred information,” Scott Campbell, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan told Tech News Daily.
“Facebook makes listing a child announcement as casual as updating job information and hobbies.”
In addition, some users are also fearful of the touchy consequences of a messy pregnancy.
“I announced my pregnancy on my Facebook page at something like 6 weeks, which I now completely regret,” one woman wrote on a BabyCare message board about her miscarriage. “I wasn’t sure how to handle letting people know I’d lost the baby, so I just didn’t post anything specific.
“Right afterward, some friends/family who knew made it pretty obvious what had happened with their posts. However, I’ve had several people write to me asking me how the baby is doing. It is so hard to get those messages/posts.”
Facebook users have been able to list family members on their personal pages since December 2010, and have been given the option of listing “civil union” or “domestic partnership” since this February.
Moms- and dads-to-be were also previously able to create separate profiles for their unborn children with the ultrasound as a profile picture.
But this latest development goes one step beyond, also allowing parents to add the name of the unborn child and a due date – with each update becoming a notification on the user’s Facebook wall.
“We’re always testing new features,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “Facebook started providing the option to add an ‘Expected: Child’ as a way for users to more accurately express their identity.”
