Too many social sites, too many status updates. I’ve been trying for a while now to find one place where I can type in one status update and have it show up wherever I want — Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, you name it. Isn’t that what this whole Web 2.0 crap is supposed to be about?
Well, I finally found a solution in hellotxt.com. It has the ability to post one update in multiple places, there’s a Facebook app so I can do it in Facebook if I want, there’s a mobile app so I can do it from the device, I can login to their own site and post there, etc. etc. etc. But now I’m faced with a bigger problem.
Verbs.
You see, when you submit an update to Twitter, it posts the update, and all of your Tweets read like a first person account of what you’re doing. When you submit an update to Facebook, it automatically puts your first name at the beginning of the update, so now all of your status updates are presented in the third person. For instance, if a guy named Bob were to submit “Go Red Sox!” as a status update, it would look like this:
Twitter: Go Red Sox!
Facebook: Bob Go Red Sox!
Which makes no sense (at least on Facebook). So how can we solve this? The best thing i’ve come up with so far is to start each status update with a verb. But no ordinary verb. Only verbs that are identical in the first and third person. Verbs like ‘can’ or ‘will’. So if Bob posts “will take out the garbage later”, it reads:
Twitter: will take out the garbage later
Facebook: Bob will take out the garbage later
Unfortunately, ‘can’ and ‘will’ are the only two verbs like these that I’ve come up with so far. Any others people want to contribute? Only rule is that it has to be identical for both first person and third person. Post them in the comments, or email me…
UPDATE #1: Talked about this with friends last night. Added could, should, and oughta to the list. For being publishing/grammar types, though, they generally didn’t think this was a very interesting problem.
