"heart" verb strawmen: "update-relationship" plus enum: single, complicated, open, relationship, engaged, married, widowed

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Tantek Çelik

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Jul 29, 2010, 10:35:44 PM7/29/10

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Continuing the relationship update special case, I've drafted a couple
of strawmen brainstorm proposals on the wiki based on research of
existing user interfaces and publishing practices:

Summary:
new verb: "update-relationship"
new direct object enum:
* single, complicated, open, relationship, engaged, married, widowed

See the wiki for details, and feel free to critique choice of names,
granularity, etc.

http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/heart#Verbnamebrainstorms

If I'm completely getting this wrong and there is already a way to
do/represent this with the existing "Update" verb, could someone
please provide a simple markup example that demonstrates how to do so?
(e.g. how would you express the "is single" "is in a relationship"
example on the wiki).

If there is already a way to do this, I'd rather not unnecessarily add
to the vocabulary.

Also: repeating requests:

1. Does anyone have screenshots of "is single" or "is in a
relationship" status posts? @factoryjoe.com - do you have screenshots
of this in your Flickr compendium somewhere?

2. Please add more examples to the wiki, of what you've personally
*seen* on Facebook (not just "want"), and *especially* other sites
too.

3. Does anyone know of any other sites that show relationship changes
in any significantly different way like Facebook? Windows Live?
Anybody?

Thanks,

Tantek

--
http://tantek.com/
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Monica Keller

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Aug 2, 2010, 2:00:18 PM8/2/10

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So relationship here is a noun. We are saying that a person has a
single relationship. This is a romantic relationship. And this
relationship has a couple properties that get captured by social
networks:
1- Type of relationship: dating, engaged, married
2- Subject --> The other person

Whether the verb is "update" and has a "change" field that indicates
the field name is "relationship" or the verb is "update-relationship",
the stream consumer will be able to extract the same information. If
looking up a human template only depends on verb and object type then
it will probably sounds a little weird. However this is true for most
of the profile fields like say Address. Unless you are switching on
the name of the change.

The only place Facebook syndicates this info is in real time updates
and we are using a generic mechanism to send changes to these fields
because the goal is data synchronization.

Based on this info. Here is my recommendation on how to represent the
change which is pretty generic but feel human readable to me

{
"actor" : {"id":1212, "displayName" : "Peter"},
"verb" : "update",
"change" :
{
"name" : "relationship status",
"value" : {"$ref": "#object.relationship.status"}
},
"object" : {
"id": 1212,
"displayName" : "Peter",
"objectType" : "person",
"relationship" : {
"status" : "married", /* Use your enum here */
"to" : {"id":"878787", "displayName" : "Sally", "type" :
"person"}