Fortuitous after all?

O the comedy, the tragedy, the semi tragi-comedy of online friendships. Let us pontificate.

About two months ago a website called Fo.rtuito.us launched--providing an opportunity to meet and make friends with strangers based solely on intellectual affiliation, i.e. without all the usual hangups or race, gender, etc. I joined and made several new friends, with a gradient of privacy barriers taken down. Interestingly, many of the funniest exchanges involve me explaining to new users that they shouldn't have just told me (in the first email) a laundry list of their age/sex/nationality/race. Many join without really understanding the intent of Fortuitous, which is all right and we all have fun anyway.

Within the last week, Fortuitous added a feature that allows users to "tag" their friends and makes those tags publicly viewable. Isn't this a bad idea from the get go? Tagging in this context immediately leads to descriptions of sex/age/nationality/race/etc. pegged onto the individuals. I had that forethought before I added tags to my friends, so chose only more meaningful and also privacy-preserving descriptors. However, yesterday I found I received my first tag. Can you guess what it was? (hint at right)

I think this is funny and I'm even a bit proud that whatever I've been saying in there hasn't revealed all. But, really, it is a little weird. Will the friends on fortuitous who know my gender think I was lying? (My picture is a avatar.) I'm not too concerned, but it raises interesting questions.

What if others post more damning or simply harmfully inaccurate tags on other fortuitous members? Another user tagged one of my friends "hot." Accurate though that may be (he does use a regular picture), being labeled by your body is fundamentally antithetical to the fortuitous experiment. Further, what if someone is labeled, well, the opposite of 'hot'? Actually, I'm sure many women would be quite offended to be called a male at all.

Updated: in new post