My wife came to me with an interesting request – a family profile on Facebook.  Seems there are a lot of people that we know of Facebook that we don’t know individually but as a family.  A family-to-individual connection best describes our relationship with them rather than the individual-to-individual relationships that are more common.  A family profile would allow us to present the activities and thoughts of our family in a unified way to the outside world.  We have such a profile on Windows Live, and it’s been a great way for others to see the whole activity of our family at a glance.

I was excited by the idea.  I had never heard of such a concept before, but it made sense.  Working on a social networking product myself, I was intrigued to see how the proposal would play out.  I attempted to create a family account on Facebook, but I was thwarted at every turn as the signup system continually rejected the names that I chose.  “The Rutledges”, “The Rutledge Family”, '”Rutledge Family” – all of them didn’t meet Facebook’s bar for names.  I finally sent e-mail to Facebook support, and I was informed that families are not allowed to create profiles on Facebook – only individuals.  Here’s a snippet of the e-mail that I received:

> Facebook profiles are meant to represent a single individual. Groups, families, businesses and other types of organizations are not permitted to maintain an account. We apologize for the inconvenience.
>
> If you would like to use Facebook to represent your group, we offer a Groups application. Facebook Groups allow users with common interests to come together to express objectives, discuss issues, post photos, etc. If you have a personal Facebook account, you can create a group from the top of the Groups page.

Drat!  I don’t want to create a Facebook Group.  Groups seem to be meant for group members to communicate amongst themselves.  This is different - I want to be able to project our family image, activity, and interaction in a unified way to the outside world.  I gave up for a few days, but I finally got the process to work by choosing “Rutledge Fam” as the name.  Suboptimal, but I’ll try to see if I can change the last name back to “Family” after I get the confirmation mail and finish the signup process.

I’m looking forward to taking our real-life family identity to the web and seeing how it can help to us to connect and share with the people we care about.