Do you remember… Facebook statuses that began with "is"?

For a while, every Facebook status had to start the same way: with your name, then the word “is”. The site filled both in for you, and all you could do was finish the sentence. So everyone wrote about themselves in the third person, like a narrator in their own life. Jen is bored. Mike is going to the pub. Becky is wondering why she has to start with is.

It made for some heroic grammar. Anyone who wanted to say something that didn’t fit simply bent the sentence until it did, and the results read like a stream of slightly odd telegrams.

People campaigned against it, and one Facebook group demanding its removal gathered more than 180,000 members. In December 2007 Facebook gave in and made the “is” optional.

Statuses got much easier to write after that. Somehow, they never got quite so funny.