Is “Is” A Throwback?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 21st, 2007 10:50 AM

This morning I awoke thinking about one thing: will “is” be gone from my status updates? Apparently it is not gone yet. If you noticed, yesterday’s article title included a question mark. All that has been changed is the development side of things. I have received reports from individuals that have been able to remove “is” from their status updates though. Is this a big deal? Not really but there was a lot of buzz yesterday about the status as Mike Arrington pointed out.

I am hoping that soon “is” will be a throwback as Mary Specht suggested in my comments yesterday. I was also speaking with Eric Eldon of Venturebeat about making “is” a meme similar to lolcats. So perhaps we can start it with this post. Nick is feels like today will be a great day!

I’m not quite sure when Facebook will decide to remove the is or if they ever will. The only thing that has changed is the ability for applications to remove “is” from status updates. Facebook likes to pay attention to quirky things and as such I can see the “is” staying. Are you in favor of “is” being removed? Nick is suggests that we write about something else on the other posts today.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 10:50 am and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Stephane Daury 9 months ago 1 point
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Actually, they must be working on something still, because the status field has been broken in my profile view since yesterday (Firefox, at least). If I edit my status on the Profile screen, the text is non-editable, and hitting backspace will reload the whole page, with my status untouched. Setting my status from the News Feed screen works fine though. Also, I've noticed a bug in the last few weeks in the Mini Feed where my status was consistently stating "Stephane *is is* doing something", when the other places where the status is displayed did not (so it wasn't me doubling up),

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Nick O'Neill 9 months ago 1 point
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Hi Stephane,

I have noticed similar issues. You gotta post an "is" statement when writing a comment for this post though! It's not as easy as you would think!

Nick is finds it hard to come up with "is" statements.

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theharmonyguy 9 months ago 1 point
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I've been doing tests with an application, and I can't get rid of "is" even when I set the new parameter they mentioned. I'm wondering if they've temporarily rolled back the API changes from the other night.

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http://theharmonyguy.com/

Simon Owens 9 months ago 1 point
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I've definitely been annoyed with how the word "is" limits what I can write in my status. I think it was a good initial method of stressing to members what the status feature is for, but now that we have the hang of it I think they should get rid of it.

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Jordan 9 months ago 1 point
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I'm sorry, but that is noobish. The Internet is not your army. One guy does not decide a meme. LOLcats got it's start in a few deeply rooted communities and was capitalized on by a few people. I'm sorry for being an ass, but to assume one can create a meme themselves, and expect acceptance of it is just asinine.

In other news though, I check 4 times a day to see if I can remove the 'is' that I might impress friends with my prowess. Sadly I can't see this 'impress my friends' thing happening :(

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Dean 9 months ago 1 point
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What I have noticed is that if you go on the Facebook iPhone optimized website (iphone.facebook.com) and go to update your status, it said [your name] and then a text box... no is... but when you type something in the text box, it adds an is after you submit.

Could this be a sign of things to come?

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theharmonyguy 9 months ago 1 point
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btw, Facebook has confirmed on their bug tracker that the change to the status feature is not live, despite the dev news feed. Updates should come soon.

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http://theharmonyguy.com/