Grammatical Freedom for Facebook Users

"To be, or not to be: Now Facebook users can decide"

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking website around, worth over 8 billion US dollars. Cultivated and grown in the education sector, registration closed to university emails only, Facebook has transcended to a more open website claiming over 58 million members and growing rapidly. It is a place to socialize with friends next door, around the corner, or thousands of miles away, make new friends and share your thoughts, feelings, likes and dislikes, where distance is not a factor anymore.

For years, members of the online hangout has been able to compose one-liners called "status updates" to tell friends what's going on with them, as in, "Sameeh is mixing Windows with Linux". Each update started with the member's name and "is" followed by a blank box. This led to tongue in cheek workarounds (Sameeh is wants to grill Vista on Redhat). Some ignored "to be" completely and followed "is" with a second active verb.

Several groups were formed petitioning against "is" in status updates. One of the largest group being "Petition to Get Rid of ‘is’ from Facebook Status Update!" initiated by a technology consultant, Ahmed Shama, with 182,015 members. Many who speak languages other than English complained that Facebook was imposing a very English-specific way of updating your status.

It's not easy to write whatever you want in the status update, with the "is" forcing you. Most of you would have seen funny status messages, because of the user being tied to "is". Anyway, On November, Facebook hinted on dropping the verb, and the users declared freedom on 13th December. Now, the "Sameeh is wants to grill Vista on Redhat" a thing of the past, users can supply their own verb for "status updates".

You must've been bored reading this... Go and enjoy FACEBOOKING...... hehe...

Cheers!

Hammett