Facebook follies

Facebook has this "status update" feature that allows you to give everyone a quick impression of what's going on in your head and in your life. The feature is found at the top of your profile page and starts the sentence off your you:

[Name] is...

This is one example of Facebook's many annoying quirks: the status update feature is not a bad idea, but that annoyingly unalterable "is" cuts down on what you can say. Wouldn't it be nice to have a completely blank field to play with? No [Name], no [is]?

I don't think I'm the only person frustrated by this, because other Facebook users seem to have gotten the same idea I did: if you can't write freely, then subvert the feature-- fill in the blanks with nonsense, the surreal, and/or with completely unrevealing information. Far from being a useful, flexible way of updating one's status for the world, the feature, in the hands of the frustrated masses, becomes what it already is: a farce.

Take Joel, for instance. Joel's on Facebook, and he created a recent status update that said:

Joel is a hater.

I cracked up. The world needs more Joel-style hateration.

On my own entry, a recent status update showed the following:

Kevin is busy admiring his prodigious man-tits.

An earlier update said:

Kevin is very excited for Russia now that Vladimir Putin has dissolved its government.

Why bother with status updates, eh? For me, Facebook is at best a necessary evil.


_