Facebook has a problem.

Grammar geeks will have noticed that Facebook has a lot of made up words in its system, such as “themself” and moments where it has to say “Larry has changed their profile.”

A lot of this comes from people not specifying their gender in their profiles, and this is creating quite a significant headache for Facebook’s translators.

With Facebook now the world’s number one social network, and with expansion to Russia and China among other nations part of the reach, language difficulties are popping up as one of the obstacles to a more united Facebook. In languages like French, where gender is important in determining what words to use, some rather garbled looking results are popping out.

So Facebook is kindly asking its users to specify their sex so it’s easier on the translators.

Stated reasons aside, it’s also a good way for Facebook to get their hands on a few more pieces of demographics. Targeting gender-specific products is impossible without the specification.

In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook also dropped the “is” from their “What am I doing” bar last year so as not to limit the possibilities.

Story via the AP

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 9:59 amand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.