Rarely has such a small word caused so much excitement.
The obsessive Facebook watchers on allfacebook.com have spotted a note from Facebook's developer site indicating that the "is" from status updates is about to be lifted. (I say obsessive, because these people rigorously comb through Facebook's code to spot clues about changes to the site.)
The essence of this snippet, which would hardly pass muster with the Plain English Campaign, appears to suggest the 'is' might become optional:
"Starting with tonight's push, any API calls that return information about users' status messages, including FQL and users.getInfo, will be changing slightly. The return value will now start with a verb, so prepending "is " is no longer required. So in order to construct a full status message it is now $name + ' ' + $message, instead of $name + ' is ' + $message. Additionally, users.setStatus will be able to avoid prepending the word "is " by passing in an additional parameter: "status_includes_verb". If you pass in true for that parameter, it signals to us that we should *not* prepend the word "is " to the status you give us. In a few, we will delete that parameter and change the default behavior to be that you must include your own verb."
This post said the change would take effect from last night, although I've been playing and it doesn't seem any different. allfacebook's Nick ONeill said some people had been able to delete the 'is', so that seems the likely outcome.
Facebook's official response is a disappointing "we don't have anything to report on the 'is' in the status message".
Facebookers are of two minds; those who want to be free of the shackles of 'is' and having to wrap their 'expressive presence' around the now, and those who like the grammatical challenge.
- Jemima is roasting almonds.
- Jemima was roasting almonds, but then started polishing her glass walrus collection.
It gives us so much more scope, you see.
You can, of course, lobby by joining any number of Facebook groups including:
Why does my Facebook profile status have to start with "is" (377 members)
Free the Facebook Status Verb, NOW! (227 members)
The international campaign to remove the 'is' prefix from Facebook status (374 members)
Facebook petition - kill the "is"- or give us a choice (452 members)
I enjoy getting creative with my Facebook Status so don't take it seriously (71 members)
And, move diversely, the society against John Stone's boring Facebook status updates (40 members). Perhaps dropping the 'is' will give him a little more inspiration?
Source: allfacebook.com
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