I've known people who found out their partner was breakig up with, or divorcing them, via facebook. (I guess the new tech equivalent to just not returning calls or serving papers?). sigh.

not cool. just like "you can't text message break-up! after two years!" ;)

That I just read there are something like 200 million Facebook users, does 237 members of the "I hate my ex-husband" group and 104 members of "I HATE MY (SOON TO BE) EX WIFE SHE'S SUCH A BITCH FAN CLUB" group really constitute some kind of big trend?

the natural progression of human relationships, from " I love You" to, after the breakup or pending divorce; " I hate your fucking guts and would like to see you die of cancer, etc." isn't this what " Love" is all about? I used facebook, recently, to badmouth this town's soon to retire top cop[ resident CT state trooper] before moving and so much more; so why should not spouses do the same to their now objects of pure hatred?

My husband was new to facebook and not that familiar with how the 'relationship' tag worked. He accidentally changed relationship status from being married to me, to just being married. Facebook automatically published a story in all my friends' newsfeed that I was "no longer listed as married" So my own sister calls me and asked if I was ok, and she thought I was crying. I said "why would I be crying?" She said, well facebook says you are not married anymore!

So we were accidentally facebook divorced for a day.

To clarify: The two paragraphs that follow the indented quote are not direct quotes. They do summarize the article's points, but everything that comes directly from Time appears in quotes.

Salon is skewering an article from the mainstream media. The original article came from Time magazine, including the groups with the tiny membership used to support their claims that this is a big! new! phenomenon.

It might be easier to tell this if all the paragraphs that are quoted verbatim from Time were indented to show they were quotes. Only one paragraph is, but the two following it are also direct quotes. A bit sloppy, that.

One thing that seperates Salon from other sites is the refusal to draw an arbitrary line between trivial and historical news. If the site were ignoring Obama, Korea, or Iran and concentrating on Jennifer Anniston's love life, I'd see you're point. But all of us spend lots of time online, we know how even a trivial blip in the online world can have repercussions in our personal lives, and Salon chimes in on it. I get tired of the endless "sexy" stories, but I find no fault with this one, even if the subject isn't Pulitzer Prize winning material.

It seems like every day Broadsheet publishes articles skewering yet another dubious 'lifestyle trend' piece from the mainstream media. Always, I have agreed with your writers about the over-hyped banality of these articles, though the critiques themselves have become monotonous and too agonizingly detailed for my taste. Here, you seem to have fallen into the exact formulaic trap that you have mercilessly exposed in other media: pick a trendy topic (social media), concoct a 'trend' based on the flimsiest empirical evidence (the best you could find was two Facebook groups with a combined membership of 341?), and then admit in the last paragraph that this is just ordinary behavior that has been going on for years. So... what was the point? This is fluff, and lazy fluff at that - the kind of thing I expect you to expose, not propagate.