The Facebook Status Dilemma - 1st or 3rd person?

Posted on: 2 September 2009

This is something that has puzzled me since Facebook had the big design overhaul and changed the way a few features of the site worked. Remember, there was an uproar? I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but it was around September last year. I’m talking about the way we now update our status on Facebook.

In the old days updating our status was simple. You were given “Yourname is…” and you just had to fill in the rest of the sentence. It was also obvious the difference between your status updates and someone writing on your wall. Everyone was happy.

It was still fairly obvious what to do when they got rid of the “is”. It was good, in fact, because you could now have statuses like “Sam thinks…” rather than “Sam is thinking” - which just plain sucked. Things only started to get a little ambiguous when they redesigned the site.

Everyone was used to writing their statuses in the third person. Y’know - like you were someone else talking about yourself. “Sam is doing this”, rather than “I am doing this”. However, now it’s unclear (at least to me) as to whether status updates should be written in 1st or 3rd person.

On top of that, Facebook decided that your status updates and other people’s posts on your wall would be essentially displayed as the same thing. And since there’s no reason you would post something on someone’s wall in the third-person, it seems odd to continue with the old conventions of third-person status updates.

So, as utterly useless as this post is, I write it in the vain hope that someone else out there shares my sentiments or has at least noticed and is equally as bemused.