Status Update: Facebook Is Letting Users Drop the "Is"
Facebook has caved into popular demand and will make the "is" in status updates optional, effective tonight, according to allfacebook.com. — The much despised "is" has been a mandatory component of the status update …
Context & Ripple Effects
The edit is one word, but the timing is loaded: Facebook is making the 'is' prefix optional days after Mark Zuckerberg closed a $240 million Microsoft investment valuing the company at $15 billion, and while its Beacon ad system was drawing confirmed privacy complaints for posting users' partner-site purchases into friends' News Feeds.
For a one-character change, the story travelled unusually far — Read/WriteWeb, All Facebook and TechCrunch all carried it on or about November 20, with TechCrunch's headline suggesting the blogosphere needed a vacation over it. One confirmed wrinkle in the rollout: the word 'is' briefly disappeared from status messages and then reappeared before tonight's official change.
First-order effects
- Starting tonight, every Facebook user's status field becomes free-form, ending the enforced third-person 'X is…' construction that had been mandatory until now.
- Users who noticed the prefix intermittently vanish and return in recent days effectively get the permanent version of what had been an unexplained glitch.
Second-order effects
- The concession hands Facebook a cheap, highly visible win on user responsiveness at exactly the moment it is defending Beacon, the ad system pushing partner-site activity into News Feeds against campaigner objections.
Third-order effects
- Treating the status field as open text rather than a fixed attribute turns the update box into the network's core publishing surface, where format rules, length limits and audience controls become competitive product choices rather than implementation details.
The trend: Social platforms are learning that rigid, imposed schemas lose to user-shaped conventions, making the status box the most contested interface in the product.