Appliance support site takes a tumble at social networking

If any given piece of slang is dead when kids hear their parents using it, it's possible that social networking's stake in the heart is in place now that household appliances are getting into the act.

In a sense the situation's even worse than you'd think from that news. (After days of heavy rain in Seattle, this reporter would be thrilled if her sump pumps would communicate civilly with the storm sewers.) No, Moms Like Us, which Samsung advertises as "a social network for their Washers and Dryers that celebrates 'Life, Laundry and the Pursuit of Cleanliness,'" is demoralizing not because the machines are talking, but because of the view it takes of the humans who are in theory the boss of those machines.

Despite the name, apparently one need not have produced live offspring to view the site, though the circle-skirted woman on the site's front page appears to have delivered one and might be be in the process of gestating another. (She's also not only barefoot but but sporting a bit of what the tabloids these days call a "bump." Barefoot, maybe-pregnant, and next to a poll asking what sort of bribery it would take to coerce one's husband to do the laundry -- this isn't a social-networking site, it's a time machine.)

In theory, the core of the site -- four "Samsung Family Moms" (are there non-family moms?) take home a high-end washer-dryer set and report back -- is appealing, and the periodic contests to win a new washer-dryer set is nice too. Expert information is helpful too, so if the Laundry-Pedia section weren't currently offline, that might be useful for those seeking help with strange stains, or advice when fabric-softener abuse has waterproofed one's towels.

But they have a name for information troves like that: They call those Web sites. And they call laundry a task you do to facilitate living a real life, not something that presents a networking opportunity.

They also don't always call the people who do that task "moms." (This reporter was wondering why the revered and lovely title of "mother" has been universally language-demoted to the one-syllable whine of "mom," but that's another screed.) Even some of the 17,000 people who have registered with Moms Like Us are appalled by what Samsung hath wrought, and the most popular thread on the site castigates the company for assuming that fathers, childless folk, and even children themselves don't perform basic household functions. If the site's not a time machine, maybe it's from Cheesy Commercial Land, where kids are too sassy to do chores and husbands are dead stupid about basic household tasks.

On the whole, though, the entire prospect is just depressing -- not because not enough people are included in the site's title, but because Samsung's corralled some 17,000 people who derive so much of their identity from owning and operating an expensive but ultimately boring household appliance. MySpace may be chaotic and Facebook full of silly gadgetry, but at least they don't assume that your status line is eternally set to "washerwoman."