There’s more than enough repetition on Facebook as it is, as people post and repost the same thing — often some faux-inspirational pablum or the latest “torturing and killing kittens and grandmothers is horrible! I bet 99% of you won’t have the guts to repost this” bullshit — over and over again. But did you know that there’s an app for people who want to post status updates but don’t want to go to the trouble of actually writing out a sentence or two?
Last Sunday, Jennifer C. updated her Facebook status. Her friends found it funny; two commented, and three clicked the like button. “Fact of life…After Monday & Tuesday, even the calendar says W T F !!” was the status Jennifer had written. Except she hadn’t written it. And neither had the other 120,000-plus people who have also used it as their Facebook status.
That status comes from Status Shuffle, a Facebook application (and accompanying iPhone app) that allows users to choose from a variety of pre-written statuses and post them to their Facebook profile as if they were their own. According to its creators, it has four million active users a month and is one of the longest-running applications on the site. It’s a minor Facebook phenomenon.
The “fact of life” Facebook status is their most popular, they say, and has been used in exactly the same way, questionable punctuation and all, over 120,000 times. That may very well make it the most commonly occurring sentence on all of Facebook.
This cracked me up:
On both Facebook and the App Store, where it is, at time of writing, the number two most downloaded paid social-networking app, Status Shuffle is incredibly popular and sparklingly reviewed. Users have to feel as if they’re getting away with something. That is, unless their friends have heard of Status Shuffle and noticed its app icon below their status.
“I posted something on Facebook without knowing it would say u used status shuffler,” App Store user Nicky843 wrote in a rare two-star review earlier this month, “so my friends think I’m a loser who can’t come up with my own status.”
That’s because you’re a loser who can’t up with your own status. Even weirder is that some of the statuses you can choose from this app are personal in nature, like this:
My friends told me to leave you alone. But i ignored them. i loved you, i hugged you, i kissed you. I feel stupid now because i didn’t listen. And now i miss you.
The fact that it’s grammatically incorrect makes it even better, because that’s how people actually do write most of the time. So they want to take someone else’s thoughts, but they also want to make sure that it looks authentic.
Looking closer at App Store reviews, it’s clear people who use the app for their status are using it like one would use a greeting card, to express a mood better than they can in their own words. “Everything I’m feeling they have something for it,” Sammie_69 wrote this week. “In love using status shuffle because I’m not good with words myself,” wrote Missy09/02/09. As Solomon put it, users come into the app after a certain “life event,” looking for “a piece of text that embodies how they’re feeling.” According to Solomon, this status has been used over 116,000 times: “I am strong because I know my weaknesses. I’m alive because I’m a fighter. I am wise because I’ve been foolish. I laugh because I’ve known sadness.”
Still, you’re not going to find anything profound or terribly witty on Status Shuffle. These statuses are written, after all, by people who came to the app because they don’t feel they’re very good at writing statuses. There are categories like “Christian inspirational,” “divorce sarcasm,” “Edward Cullen is gay,” “fake bitches,” “I love you baby x,” “Justin Bieber gay,” “pissed at boys,” “sarcasm bitchy,” “sisters 4 ever,” “squirrels,” “truck drivers,” “two-faced bitches,” and “WWE quotes.”
The word “pathetic” comes to mind.
19 comments
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lofgren
May 12, 2012 at 10:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Dude this post is so funny Imma repost it to all my bros.
I think the smug superiority and tone of dickish judgement of something you don’t understand is my favorite part.
The word “asshole” comes to mind.
TCC
May 12, 2012 at 10:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, I’ve noticed that in other people’s statuses. I wondered what it was, but I figured it was something like this since the statuses were obviously not written by them.
regexp
May 12, 2012 at 10:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
With the exception of my family – my facebook “friends” are actually friends and we treat facebook as it was intended – to make fun of each other.
What I don’t necessarily get is all the hate the site gets. Yes – this is a stupid application which will be used by stupid users (e.g. my family) but does it really warrant a post bitching about it?
Phillip IV
May 12, 2012 at 11:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I love that they have a category “Christian Inspirational” – nothing says “my personal relationship with Jesus is crucial to me” than trying to inspire fellow Christians with ready-made messages selected from a menu.
Didaktylos
May 12, 2012 at 11:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh – (time to put my pedantic Classicist’s hat on) the correct plural of “status” is “status”, but with the second syllable pronounced “ooze”.
Derek Czajka
May 12, 2012 at 11:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So, if we still have to use the original Latin morphology for plurals, should we not also have to decline the word for case?
KathyO
May 12, 2012 at 12:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is great. I’m going to use Status Shuffle to write my blog posts from now on.
Ed Brayton
May 12, 2012 at 12:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
regexp wrote:
Since the one and only criteria for what does and doesn’t warrante a post is whatever the hell I feel like writing about, the answer to that question can only be yes.
Pierce R. Butler
May 12, 2012 at 2:01 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
… what does and doesn’t warrante a post …
Ed, have you beene hangeing oute withe PhysioProffe againe?
otrame
May 12, 2012 at 3:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, me too. My son is currently in the first few days of stopping smoking and the amount of loving harassment he is getting about it from his brother and many of his friends is wonderful. It may seem weird that that harassment is meant to encourage him, but that’s my family. Entirely made up of smart-asses, even the one’s who marry in.
I like that part of Facebook, the quick connection to family and friends. The rest is of no interest to me, but frankly, why does anyone else have to use the thing the way I do?
tacitus
May 12, 2012 at 4:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Facebook, like Twitter, has become an indispensable way for professionals and artists (writers, actors, vloggers, etc.) to keep their name in front of their paying audience. When I went to a writer’s conference last year, the number one topic was social media and how to use it, and when I looked into the self-publishing market (Kindle, Nook, etc) the most successful authors are typically those who maintain a significant presence on the social media networks.
Now, I doubt anyone using Status Shuffle is going to win any fans, but the idea of frequent (at least daily) updates is a sound one (as it is for blogs too, of course) and I know one author who has now sells a large back-catalog of books on the Kindle Store who changes the price of one of this books on a daily basis so that he then has an excuse to post on Facebook and Twitter about it.
MartinM
May 12, 2012 at 5:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Since this is apparently ‘pick on Ed’ day: criterion.
cottonnero
May 12, 2012 at 8:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
More precisely, ‘Pick on Ed for grammatical and typographical minutia’ Day, which is the second Saturday of every month with an odd number of letters.
Rip Steakface
May 13, 2012 at 1:08 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t have a Facebook (yes, rare for a teen who is technologically able), but in the event I were to lose my mind and get a Facebook and use Status Shuffler, my friends would be tipped off incredibly quickly without even seeing the app icon.
I make a hearty attempt to use mostly correct grammar and spelling in all my writing, including text messages. The instant they see something with multiple exclamation points and poorly using an ellipsis on my profile, they’d know something is up.
I make mistakes, but c’mon, there’s obviously things like spaces after punctuation – that’s a hard and fast rule of pretty much all modern languages that use the Latin alphabet, so far as I remember.
democommie
May 13, 2012 at 7:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“I don’t have a Facebook (yes, rare for a teen who is technologically able),”
The snarkfu is strong in this one, and at such a tender age! {;>)
Facebook makes it much easier for me to friend people who then ignore me, just like they did when it was done with e-mailing or–for those old enough to remember–physcially written letters on PAPER!
matty1
May 13, 2012 at 9:08 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s not fair to criticise Ed for this post, he used an app to write it for him.
Pinky
May 13, 2012 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve had a Facebook account for years. After an initial flurry of interest I found it not to my tastes. A bind I found myself in was not wanting to offend relatives or friends or friends of relatives by turning down their requests to friend.¹ Sure they are people I enjoy talking with, but I do not want to read banality as “My baby took a giant defecation in his diapers, what a mess.” (Facebook translation: “jon plum loded diapers w shit ittsa mess frser”) or “I feel crappy today”, an invitation to solicit sympathy.
Another reason my interest in Facebook waned was the poor response I received from the long detailed harangues I would write. I was getting a low (zero % actually) response from my ‘friends.’ My son explained it to me in four letters: dr:tl to which I nodded sagely and said: “Yeah that would explain it.” Then I looked up what the abbreviation meant after he left.
I still have the account, but only check it every few months. No detail of my private life goes down the moneymaking information funnel as I prevaricated throughout my profile.
On Facebook, as with all my electronic dealings, I never input anything I would not mind the whole world seeing. On that issue I’m reminded of a young, not terribly bright woman in the UK who wrote on her Facebook page:
(¹ Yes turning friend into a verb makes me twitch.)
(² I believe ‘pervy bastard’ is British slang meaning: a man who enjoys glimpsing a woman’s cleavage with the idea of cranking the love pump³ later.)
(³ My editor said I should clarify what is meant by ‘cranking the love pump.’ I believe it can be best explained with the phrase: ‘taking the Jocelyn Elders midterm’ or for the gun aficionados: ‘cleaning your rifle.’ I hope that helps.)
Pinky
May 13, 2012 at 1:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Since I’ve been infected by the meme-of-the-day;
we should ask Jack Stuef, the BuzzFeed Contributor who wrote the article Ed quoted, if a better meaning of “pre-written” might be: “The ideas or thoughts of an author before being engraved in ink on paper or having set electrons dancing on the internet?”
Perhaps Mr. Stuef would give us a free gift if we point it out to him.
jayarrrr
May 14, 2012 at 9:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s true…
“There’s an Ap for that!”