Defining “Is”

I’m not really trying to re-hash the Clintonian parsing of the verb of being, I just like the allusion.

Instead, I’m here to tell all you troubled souls – 66,523 members at my most recent count – that your efforts, our efforts, have not been in vain. Facebook has mercifully removed “is” from it’s status updates. Now all Facebook users are free to live in the past or plan for the future or use a colon to express their status.

Yippee!

I’ve been using a clever process for a while now where my Facebook status is populating my Twitter. It’s a little inelegant since I’m not stripping out “Seth is” from the feed and all the links point back to Facebook – causing some potential problems when I put URLs in my status – but it was/is (ha!) a start.

I’m struck with this paralysis, though. All my Status updates seem naked, pointless and weird if they start with “Seth” and aren’t immediately followed by a verb of being. An “is” seems pretty necessary.

I suppose I could start doing “Seth walks on water” or “Seth thinks the mandatory “is” may have been beneficial in most cases”. I guess I just think Twitter has the whole status game figured a little bit better.

I also feel, when I actually use Twitter, that I should write actively. Still, the update “blogging about Facebook status changes and Twitter” has an understood “I Am” as the subject, so they’re virtually the same. Maybe it’s just the way Facebook displays the status and links back to your profile or includes your real name and not a username.

Or maybe I’ve just transposed a molehill for a mountain. Such inversions happen to me from time to time.

Big themes:

  1. ding dong, the “is” is dead.
  2. Still working out my feelings on Facebook Status vs Twitter
  3. Fighting the urge to write for one or the other (and try to be grammatically correct either place) and just update

Hat tip to Maigh, via her Facebook Status!

UPDATE: Greg got me hip to the fact that the Facebook app for Twitter would allow Twitter access to update your Facebook Status, so I enabled that feature. At the same time, I didn’t disable my Twitterfeed (which was using Facebook Status to update Twitter). The result? This awesome infinity loop: Seth is twittering: Seth is twittering: testing. 1, 2, 3. 140? http://tinyurl.com/ypbutd. http://tinyurl.com/2jpmmj

Confused? Me too.

So I’ve disabled Twitterfeed, so now information is ONLY flowing from Twitter to Facebook and not back again. Phew!

3 thoughts on “Defining “Is”

  1. You know, instead of updating twitter via facebook, facebook now offers that service the other way around, so your facebook status is/should be “Seth is updating twitter: [insert tweet here yo!]”

    just a suggestion

  2. Tweet!…

    Here’s something that’s not news: yesterday I switched from Twitbin to Tweetbar for all my twittering tweets.
    I’ve been interested in Twitter since last year at about this time when Twitter was all the rage at SXSW. Not that I went, …

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