Doug LeMoine is puzzled that the construction of Facebook status updates requires me/him to refer to myself/himself in the third person. This format gives structure to the News Feed, but it also encourages the updater to craft the update as a sentence beginning with his/her full name. The forced third-person would seem to create myriad grammatical problems as people try to construct meaningful sentences, but pretty much everyone ignores grammatical correctness (not surprising). The surprising thing is, grammatically incorrect status updates don’t really seem weird (to me) anymore.
(It’s possible that I’m taking this all far too seriously).
When I first joined Facebook, I dutifully wrote all of my status updates in the third person, as the format dictates. Because I am both a grammar snob and a rule-follower.
Rule-abiding: Doug ... his
This construction is appropriate for the feed, but it’s also terribly awkward. Statuses are usually personal, “microblog-ish” bits of content, and it just sounds weird when personal stuff is written in the third person. Recently, I started to lapse into the first person in the body of the status, and while doing so, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable condemnation.
Rule-bending? Rule-breaking? Rule-adapting: Doug ... my
But so far, there has been no condemnation forthcoming. Why? Maybe we all quickly become blind to the totally obvious disagreement? Or maybe it just makes cognitive sense that the content of the status will be in the first person? If the latter is true, how soon will we be updating Fowler and Strunk & White to reflect this new kind of usage?
My name is Doug LeMoine. I work both on, and for, the Internet. You can find more about me in the 
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I liken it to the /me command on IRC, and suspect the people who concoct these interactions do as well. I agree, however, that what we’re actually doing with these updates is fundamentally different.
Hey, that’s interesting, Dorian. I hadn’t considered Facebook status format’s relationship to IRC syntax, but it would make complete sense that the Facebook designers consider this convention in their carrying forward of the current format. And even though Facebook statuses are different at this point, it is interesting to ponder the UI challenge in implementing something like the /me and /describe commands that IRC provides to differentiate. Thanks!
I noticed, Doug, and I silently condemned you.
Next to the little “Like” widget, Facebook should have a little widget that says something like, “Silently condemn.”
Yes! and even better, you would be able to use it to condemn not just the post, but also any of the “x likes this” flags that the post has gathered.