*  "Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other
things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

In that regard, there seems to be quite a big hole in ActivityStreams
(or I've missed something obvious).

I searched the archives of this list, and wiki.activitystrea.ms and
found nothing that corresponds to the items that you see on services
like Facebook that say/show things like:

♥ Sally just became single.

♥ John is in a relationship.

etc.

For the relationship case, if a direct object is specified, e.g.

♥ John is in a relationship with Dana.

Then this can be represented by "Post"ing a "Status" with an embedded
XFN link surrounding "Dana".

However, my understanding of the justification given for introducing
new AS verbs is to provide an opportunity for AS consuming
applications to provide a different user interface / look+feel for
different activities, and potentially who/what they are done with/to,
thus this use case is likely deserving of a different verb than "post"
(or even "update").

Is there already an ActivityStreams answer for this?

None of the current verbs in the schema seem specific enough:

http://activitystrea.ms/head/activity-schema.html#anchor4

Nor does there appear to be any examples of how you do this on the wiki or list.

In addition, this has revealed two use cases that XFN doesn't handle,
1) updating relationship status to explicitly "single", and 2)
updating relationship status to "in a relationship" without a known
(or perhaps an undisclosed) direct-object.  However, I'm in favor of
basing any microformat solution for this on an ActivityStreams
solution.

So, bottom line:

What is the (potentially new) AS verb/object for stating "... is
single", "... is in a relationship" ?

Tantek

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