What Blink Thinks.

Facebook Needs Relationship Pages October 2, 2011

Now that timeline is coming out, I’d love to tell stories that are more interesting than just ones that decorate my own history. In fact, to help reconnect and reminisce with people, why not give us a place to tell stories like how we met. Or of old college friends, and the stories we share. Old work friends, the projects with crazy bosses. I know I can just create entries in the timeline and only share them with certain people, but what I’m looking for is Facebook to encourage people to share stories about their relationships with other people.

When you click on a friend, it shows you what you have in common as far as interests and other friends, but why not expand that into a full page. Prompt me for how we first met, things we did together and pull in any photos that have us both tagged. And use the timeline interface. The default should be to only share these timelines between the people who are mentioned in them but could of course be shared more broadly.

High schoolers would love the BFF-ness of it. College friends might enjoy talking about the raging multi-keggers they had. And married people would love to tell their joint stories, whether just to preserve them somewhere or to share them with just family or with everyone. I’d also like to capture a few fun stories about some of my lifelong friends, which would be fun to share with their wives, for example. Things like a running dialogue with a childhood friend and I remembering random things like trading star wars cards and what we were for halloween years and years ago.

Think about family vacations that could be told jointly, with entries into all of our main timelines too. And more importantly, our collaborative stories all in one place. We all upload pictures separately, but since we created this relationship page with its own timeline it would automatically capture our separate photos as a joint collection (think iPhoto event). And as photos are uploaded and tagged by anyone who was there on the vacation, they’d be included in this timeline and be able to contribute to the stories.

I’d use this product. And it would make my own personal timeline a lot more interesting.

What do you think?