Facebook to Ask Members to Select "Male" or "Female" Gender

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on June 27, 2008 - 12:34pm.

San Francisco - Online social network Facebook will begin asking members to declare their gender as "male" or "female," in order to fix bugs in both English and other languages that caused grammatical errors in automated messages when the system was forced to improvise for the lack of an official pronoun, Reuters reported. Currently, the default in these cases is to use "they" or "themself," although in some languages the plural is always one gender. However, any Facebook users who choose not to define themselves by either gender will be able to opt-out. "We've received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Facebook product manager Gleit told Reuters.

 

Related Links:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080627/tc_nm/facebook_gender_dc_5

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.