How hundreds of thousands of Facebook statuses get written everyday.
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.
But most users will never see this “fact of life status” until it appears on their friend’s profile. (There are 900 MILLION Facebook users, after all.) It will appear without attribution and look more or less like any other status, so they likely will assume it was their friend who wrote it.
This is plagiarism. It’s difficult to call it anything else. These are not movie quotes or retellings of inside jokes among friends; these are obvious attempts to present sentiments written by others as one’s own, like any other Facebook status. And Facebook is apparently littered with millions of these statuses.
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.”
Status Shuffle’s 300,000 statuses are all written and submitted by the app’s users. It may be strange that people take them and present them as their own ideas with just a couple of clicks, but the original authors know going in that they’re not going to get credit for their writing. All users have to do is deceive their friends a bit.
