Facebook: ‘Is’ set to become history!?

Just when you think the online revolution has come to stand-still, rumors are abuzz online and in print media that Facebook is set to remove the mandatory “is” from status messages! An article in today’s Telegraph suggests that Facebook may secretly be testing the removal of the annoying “is” which gives itself a home in every status message that a user creates/changes on the ‘Book. If you look at it from a different light, the problem isn’t really that Facebookers are finding it annoying to not have the option to change their status messages to something like; “Cheb knows what you did last summer” instead of the funny, albeit grammatically incorrect form of “Cheb is knows what you did last summer”. The problem is that the social networking community – especially Facebook users (yes, me included – know that Facebook will eventually listen to ever word we say! Sure that may sound very narcissistic, egotistic and self-absorbed, but hear me out… Throughout the last 4-5 months, Facebook has undergone major updates to its core. You may say that was always going to happen so Facebook can keep up with the Joneses at 34 Myspace Street and 18 Youtube Lane, but that’s not always the case… Social networking was always going to expand exponentially, but with Facebook, it is clear that what the user wants, the user will get – and therefore, your honor, I offer you some examples of some changes made to ‘the Book’ recently. July 2007 (Free) Polls: What started off as a cheap way to make extra bling on the side, Facebook finally gave in to user requests (ironically through the mechanism they built themselves for those users – Groups!) – and created ‘Polls’. User’s did not think they should have to pay for creating a poll, which could be considered a ‘Web 1.0′ feature these days compared to Widgets, Gadgets and the like. Moral of the story: Facebook cracked under growing ‘groupie’ pressure and handed over the goods. </Exhibit A> August 2007 Edit profile info from home page: This option, which whilst admittedly being an uber cool use of Ajax, strikingly should have been named: “I’m too lazy to click the ‘Edit’ link on my profile and I know Facebook will do what’s best for me what I want…” Seriously now, we didn’t really need this… Sure, it’s freaking cool, but if it wasn’t for the 35,000 people joining the group “It takes too long to edit my profile” (which has now funnily shut down?), do you think Facebook would have still done this? At this speed? That early? And why is it you can’t edit contact information or for that matter, work information on the fly too? Is that feature coming soon? </Exhibit B> Okay, so understandably, I probably haven’t won you over. In time however, we will get to notice that Social ‘Utilities’ such as Facebook or Youtube, literally don’t exist with their user base – I mean, that’s not rocket science – nor will I win an award for that quote – but, it will be interesting to see how much Facebook will change (for better, or worse) as a result of user feedback at the turn of the next craze. What do you think about this topic? Do you agree? disagree? did I miss something? let us know!