Facebook - Really, I Know What a Face Is, But What the Hell Is a Book?

Well, as an author of books, and electronic books, and as a lifelong book lover with a rather large personal library I find it interesting that one of the largest companies on the Internet, Facebook, has the name Face and Book in it. That really makes no sense if you think about it. Okay so, let's talk about this for a moment.

Most corporations adjust their business model and branding identity, along with their logos from time to time. It makes sense to do this to stay up with the times, however in the Internet world things move so fast that sometimes that is not always possible. Nevertheless, at this point Facebook really needs to change their name, don't they? But they aren't, instead they are entrenching themselves, and trying to protect their brand name by suing anyone who puts the name of anything before the word book.

Unfortunately, there are some case precedents for this, and Facebook is so well known, and there are people who are attempting to infringe upon their brand, or use that brand identity to help increase the popularity of some new company, riding on the coattails of Facebook's global reputation now.

There was an interesting article on Read Write Web on March 29, 2012 titled; "Banned on Facebook: Facing, Booking and Poking," by Dave Copeland. The article was decent but really, I'd like you to consider the title for a moment, as it brought up yet another thought today for me. You see, the "paper book" as we've historically known it is completely dead, well almost, and it has been replaced by the eBook. Now then, shouldn't Facebook be called; "FaceE-book" instead? I mean their current name is "so 30-seconds ago!"

Anyway the article stated; "Facebook is trying to protect its trademarks and wants to curb the use of "book" as a verb for connecting with friends on Facebook, but Polito is worried his page may be targeted as violating the new terms. "For Facebook to tell me that I can't use the word 'book' - as in 'check out my new book,' which is something I'm posting all the time - is just plain ridiculous," Polito said. "I can't tell you how many writers I know who use Facebook to promote their books."

Some might say that Facebook should probably change its name, or within the next 5 to 10 years it will be considered a dinosaur because it is using an old term which is no longer used in our language, or very little in our society. Luckily for Facebook, the physical "book" isn't dead quite yet, so Facebook still has some time before they need to go through major rebranding, and contact someone like me who knows what they're doing, so they don't destroy all that they created.

No, I'm not interested in the job, nor would I ever wish to have a page on Facebook, I think it's childish, and silly, but that's just my opinion. Further, it would take a lot more branding to ever get me interested. Please consider all this and think it.

Posted in: business model and branding,Facebook