“is”less Facebook Status
"is"less Facebook Status (by sτενεωooδroω)
Since so many people have been asking me about my “is”less status on Facebook, I thought I’d share a little bit about the situation. My story isn’t really interesting in and of itself, but it does suggest exciting news for anyone who would prefer a verb other than “is”.
When I updated my status yesterday evening from home.php, it struck me as odd that the text box looked different — wider than normal. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the “is” in “Steve is <insert status here>” was now in the textbox along with the rest of the status. It wasn’t highlighted, so if you typed in a status without paying attention, you might not have noticed. However, I decided to see if Facebook would let me do something other than just “be”. It worked. Thanks Facebook!
So now I’m “Steve doesn’t use ‘is’ anymore. Thanks facebook!”
Doing a little more poking around revealed that profile.php also had this new “is”less ability. Checking again later in the evening, home.php was back to normal but profile.php was still able to drop the “is”. Unfortunately by this morning, it seems as though both pages were back to their normal mandatory-”is” behavior. I only found one other person I knew with an “is”less status.
Curious, I did some googling to try and determine how widespread this was, and found some news that will be of interest to those sick of “is”. AllFacebook.com reports that on the Facebook Platform news feed, developers were notified that they can now set a users’ status with a verb other than “is” (see here also). When this actually gets rolled out to the Facebook web interface is anyone’s guess, but this probably means that “is”less status messages will be coming sooner than later.
So, in advance of these changes, I bid a fond farewell to Facebook’s favorite verb over the past several years. May “is” rest in peace with Facebook Guy, wherever he may be. While I will miss the crazy status messages that people concocted (or the major grammatical errors committed) as a result of “is”, I might just get over it.
“Steve n’est pas une pipe.”