WTF EX

I very rarely use Facebook. As many problems as Twitter has with downtime and disappearing/reappearing tweets, I find the inconsistent wall listings, dates for posts, and blah blah blah over on Facebook all the more confusing and discouraging. This post is not to talk about the differences between the two services, though. I am ultimately going to compare and contrast where necessary, but probably not in the way you are thinking.

So Facebook recently went through another redesign. If you use the internet for more than checking your e-mail (which young people apparently do not use anymore), you are probably well aware of this. One of the biggest changes was the way in which the “Status Update” is structured and conveyed. Personal pages look much more like a Twitter stream than the previous status update structure did, but the biggest change may be in the verbiage. The standard Facebook status update always said something like this:

Michael LaBrie is writing a blog post right now.

With the change over to “What’s on your mind?”, someone familiar with the Facebook service and has that “(name) is…” wording so heavily ingrained in their muscle memory (if it doesn’t auto-populate the word “is” for you) would probably think something along the following:

So if I type in a random update the way I would type a tweet (say that five times fast), the result is as I would expect from using Twitter:

Here is where the disconnect comes in, though (completely ignoring all the people who manually type in “is” by themselves). I typically use the Facebook application on my iPhone to keep tabs on friends and their status updates rather than using the website. Until getting the very latest update to the application this morning, if you went to input a status update, the text input screen would still say “(name) is…”. Thankfully, here is what you will get now:

So what on Earth am I supposed to do…?! It does not seem like a huge problem, but for someone as grammatically-aware as I am, you can imagine the horrors I have unleashed upon myself when I compared a Facebook status update made on the web site directly (see above screens) versus one made from the iPhone application:

Ack! Apparently I is own a house!

The “problem” (if you want to call it that) is that Facebook has trained their users with a certain vocabulary. That standard verbiage is still entirely useful and seemingly encouraged, but they have opened-up that status update to “allow” any type of wording that a user desires. I can already see the confusion among friends and family with the way they have been typing their most recent status updates, and I can not even imagine how I would explain it to some of them.