I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it, trying to be politically correct. I see this a lot where you want to have people connected to one another in a special way on a community site. Take for instance a married couple.Well the problem is, you always have confusion as to who you are talking to, if they create a couples profile, then you still have confusion about whether or not you are talking to the husband or the wife.
In addition, that means sharing a login, and a mailbox, and galleries and groups. Both husband and wife can’t chat at the same time and all other manner of problems.
Answer: Mate Linking
This would be a little like the friends linking in principle. There would be a request to link, and the second party has to accept the link in order for the mating to complete. If the invitation is accepted, then you can use a device like CSS style tabs to put each member on the other’s profile behind it in a tab. So if you click to view someone’s profile–you can see immediately that they have a husband/wife/domestic partner on the site, and who they are.
They can post separately, have separate mailboxes, and chat separately–but anyone viewing their profiles would know that they are linked. I’ll try to throw together a mockup of what I’m talking about.
Make Meaning Or Die
Very smart idea !!!
Yes, good solution for “couples/mates” functionality. We’ll plan that for 6.1.