In the digital equivalent of putting all your former boyfriend or girlfriend's stupid crap in a box and sticking it in a dark corner of your closet, Facebook recently announced that it is testing new features and options that will allow you to see a lot less of your ex, if you want to.
In an announcement on the Facebook newsroom blog, Product Manager Kelly Winters laid out the new tools that will kick in upon the update of your relationship status. The following will pop up:
If you say yes, you can do several things like choose to see your former partner's name and profile pic around Facebook less, reduce or eliminate their presence in your news feed, and keep Facebook from suggesting their name when writing message or tagging photos. And it can do all this without blocking or unfriending the ex, which will be extremely useful for the initial period after a break up when every single thing reminds you of them and everything hurts and life is terrible. Or so I've heard.
Also useful is the option of limiting what the ex can see of you, which is both a nice convenience and can come as a form of protection for someone going through an ugly break up. Or, it could also be a form of kindness if you have a new paramour or fund new life, and don't want to be so cruel as to rub it in your ex's face.
The tools are very thorough, even providing the retroactive option of controlling who can see past posts and allowing a user to untag themselves from old posts and photos they were featured in with their ex.
Essentially, the tools allow you to review the whole relationship and decide which parts to keep and, to a certain degree, which parts to forget. Which is the kind of thing we all do at the end of a relationship, except this way involves a pleasant blue-themed interface.
The tools began testing in the United States yesterday on mobile devices, with improvements and further rollout promised in the future. Winters emphasized that all the tools were optional, and would be permanently available in the Facebook Help Center.
Winters closed by stating that "this work is part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going through difficult moments in their lives." Which, along with the expansion of other Facebook tools like the recently-in-the-news Safety Check, suggests that Facebook wants to be the communication channel of choice for all people at all moments of their lives, even the bad ones.