Crossing Media

For those of you with Gmail, you know that Gchat has a feature where you can list your status along with an "away message." For a long time, I've been noticing people using that space to mimic Facebook's "status" feature where you use the third person to describe what you are doing, e.g., [Name] "is eating 64 slices of American cheese." A few days ago I decided to be passive aggressive about it. In my own Gmail away message, I wrote the following:

Folks, gmail is not facebook. Please don't use this away message space as your facebook status crap. Rule 1: Message cannot begin with any form of the verb "to be."

The response was overwhelming. Even as I type, I see messages that say, "is trying to piss off Armen." "Armen is a loser." "To be." "is not a fan of Armen's message." Etc. I stand by my assertion. That space is for proper away messages, a la, those you find on AIM. Maybe I'm too old school, maybe everyone is a huge Bob Dole fan, but I can't stand people crossing a feature from one medium with that of another.

You have Rule 1, what's next?