Here’s an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about Facebook’s new email/instant messaging system, and here’s a video of Mark Zuckerberg and crew announcing it on Monday.
Facebook is certainly a very important and innovative company, based in the area, no less. Except for my mother, who doesn’t own a cell phone and never learned how to program her VCR before it became obsolete, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use it. Still, I have to say, I’m feeling a little over-saturated with news about the company. The book, the movie, the privacy-policy updates and design changes… As an observer who is required to keep an eye on the information stream, I feel overloaded with Facebook, the entity.
Back when I used to work for Yahoo!, there came a point when many of us lower-level employees got the distinct impression that the brand was in the midst of a negative reevaluation in the public mind. The evidence presented itself in stages — where once you used to be able to count on big smiles and eager questioning upon stating your place of business, one day you all of a sudden were met with an indifferent nod bordering on a scowl. Eventually, that non-verbal reaction turned into active kvetching: “Hey I can’t log on to my Yahoo! Mail,” you might hear. “My Yahoo! Finance portfolio disappeared! Can you help me?”Yahoo! of course made a series of well-documented missteps in yielding the original Internet Darling Crown to eBay, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, roughly in that order. Still, I have my own admittedly unempirical theory about the descent. This axiom equates a company’s positive public perception inversely to the frequency with which your average befuddled person hears its name per week. In my mind, the seeds of Yahoo!’s decline were planted when someone decided it was a good idea to affix the company monicker to as many common nouns as syntactically possible: Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Education, Yahoo! Fuzzy Dice… It just didn’t stop. Who could take that much of anything? I mean, doesn’t the phrase, “I’m tired of hearing about…” apply just as much to corporations as it does to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez?