About Face[book]: What's Your Personality?

So what makes a good status update?

"Personality," says Adam Ostrow, editor in chief of Mashable.com, an online publication that covers social networking. "Personality is really what drives people to (follow) you…”

Anne Trubek, a writer and associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Oberlin College who is studying status updates as a developing 21st-century literary form, sorted them into four categories for her column in the online magazine GOOD:

• The prosaic (Jill is baking bread);
• the informative (Jack loves this article from GOOD, followed by the link);
• the clever and funny (Johnny thinks Obama should be sworn in a few more times, just to be EXTRA safe); and
• the poetic or nonsensical (If Jim were a cloud, he would rain Earl Grey tea).¹

So what’s your personality? Clearly you can deviate, but I’m sure each of us has a predominate style.

Now let’s talk funny and clever. We’ve learned [myself included] through this Facebook blog series the following: stay positive, use photos/videos, and be funny when you can. I say be funny at least once a week. As I perused my FB friends I found I have very few funny friends. Is that a reflection on me? Am I too serious? Or have we all forgotten how important humor is in everyday life?

I have the only three examples of humor that were connected to my circle of FB friends and they made me laugh.

First is just a status update from an 18 year-old that garnered 17 likes:

“Cigarettes are a lot like hamsters, perfectly harmless until you put one in your mouth and light it on fire.”

Next, keeping with the rodent-related humor genre, this photo secured 19 likes with 9 comments, many of which contained “LOL.”

And finally, this one proved all the research correct…it was shared 184 times.

I like these comedians-Tim Hawkins (on Corporate Worship Songs), Anita Renfroe (In Tha Mutahood) - and am starting to use their material for my Friday post on the WOTH FB page. Know any others?

If you have some funny, humorous, and clever resources, please share. I can't think of a better ending to this Facebook series than laughing…out loud.

¹source: http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2009-06-09-status-writing-online_N.htm