Wondrous are the ways of on-line branding. Today is the fifth anniversary of the founding of Facebook. But if you go to your Facebook page, there is virtually no indication of this red letter day in the company’s history. Oh, you can find it if you look really hard, but you have to really look.
Contrast this with Google. Everybody’s favorite search engine would be all over something like this. One of the things we are used to seeing on Google is the headline-level acknowledgement of milestones, from Martin Luther King’s birthday to the anniversary of the first Moon landing. Being a kind of historical recordkeeper is part of the way Google inserts itself into our collective lives and consciousness – which is consistent with its role of being the place you go to find out about stuff. It’s all branding of course, but still it’s rather nice.
Facebook is nothing like that. It’s more of a place where people socialize, share personal interests, talk about something of note that happened in their day. The “branding” of Facebook is now all about trying to disappear itself – to create the illusion that it isn’t even there – just us Facebook friends hanging out together, all snug in our virtual dormroom.
And so Facebook cannot even tell us: “Hey guys, we made it. Isn’t that cool? Five years and we’re still here.” Because we don’t want them to be here. They learned that lesson the hard way – after various attempts to insert themselves into the conversation backfired quite badly. We only want us to be here, in our cozy illusion of shared personal space.
It’s the ultimate Antibranding. By refusing to celebrate its own existence, Facebook has made a perfect statement of self-identity.