One of the reasons I’m such a proponent of Twitter is that I’m oddly interested in what people are doing. It helps me evaluate the current state of culture. Before there was Twitter, though, I was using Facebook, mainly to just check the status updates of my friends. I’ve noticed that there are several categories of Facebook status messages, and I’d like to outline them for you here. There are good ways and boring ways to use these, and I’m going to let you in on those as well in an attempt to give you everything you need to write eye-catching updates.

1. The “everything I do” update. This is most like me, I think. It’s the update that lets the reader know exactly what the person is doing as often as possible. Boring way: “Ate chicken for dinner.” Exciting way: “Ate a chicken for dinner.”
2. The song lyric update. I think the idea behind this is to find a song that only you and one other person have ever heard of and then post a lyric so that the other person will in turn finish the lyric with a comment to said status update. The boring way would be to use something everyone knows, or anything by Kenny Chesney: “Back in high school, things were cool, I met this girl, we sat on the hood my car and I dropped barbecue sauce on my boots.” Instead, use the opportunity to write your own song. For example: “Ice cream college for me, for me, buttercream icing for me, for me.” The more random, the better.
3. The “update on the person no one has ever heard of” update. So my mailman’s first cousin who lives in Antarctica doing research on polar bears has overcome his torn cuticle. Thanks for that. Instead, use something like, “Over the weekend, I grew a second head. And for some reason, it was wearing a Storm Trooper helmet. But I took some medicine and got better.”
4. The “whew, I’m exhausted” update. So stop Facebooking and go to bed.
5. The once-in-a-blue-moon golden update. I have a few friends like this. They update very rarely, and when they do, it’s worth the wait. It might just be a funny one-liner, or something that makes you laugh to the point of crying, but it’s impact is felt long into the wait for the next one.
6. The run-on update. Remember English class in the, oh, second grade? Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence: “watching green acres with the fam tomorrow i’m going to my old school can i have some cookies.”
7. The shorthand update. ROFL LOL OMG
8. The Bible verse. Nothing more, nothing less.
9. The messed-up and then retyped update. You’ve all seen it. Someone misspells something and thinks they’ll be clever and redo it, only to never delete the original, thus making it twice as bad.

Go look through your friends’ status updates right now, and I’ll bet you can fit them into one of these categories. If not, what other categories are there? Have you come across a gem lately? Let me know! Maybe I’ll write a book on it someday.