Bad ideas and poor execution happen a lot, but this was a planned move that has some meaning behind it.
(I'm getting downvoted because presumably people don't realize Facebook was a common generic term used for the book universities gave to students with photos, etc. of other student to encourage socialization at the start of the year)
Also, I doubt most people have really heard of the concept of a physical facebook. From my understanding, it's limited to Harvard and maybe other schools around there.
It seems like those who own generic names are getting too old to be competitive.
- 1-800-FLOWERS
- 1-800-CONTACTS
- hotels.comHere is a good contrast, "I associate Southwest Airlines with Cheap, No Frills Flights." I don't know anything about those brands... the name doesn't tell me anything about WHY I SHOULD BUY FROM THEM.
There's a huge number of brands that use the [nation] [generic term] format, including many major international banks, airlines, and utility companies many of which totally dominate their domestic market and/or are significant internationally
Even if you're looking at the world's biggest brands and companies, then IBM, GE, GM, FedEx, NBC, BBC and even the likes of Microsoft and Coca-Cola are clearly abbreviations of very generic terms. A significant proportion of the rest are simply people's names. For all the "science" and lack thereof that goes into brand investments, generic names tend to last and "cute" names often turn out to be short-lived gimmicks
And the brand becomes verb thing happens almost accidentally which is why, no matter how much Microsoft's branding team wants us to, nobody ever asks their friends to "just Bing it", whereas everyone "Xeroxes" stuff despite the xerography company in question actively spending to discourage the genericization of its trademark.
Update: stamps.com and audible.com are also good examples.
Blogger, Dropbox, XVideos.
Branding is the battle for peoples perceptions, and follows the rules of how our minds perceive things. Your mind is not capable of assigning meaning to a generic term. You can know what they do, but you cant associate it with a category. "American Airlines" does not mean an American Airline in anybody's mind. Just as Buy.com doesn't mean anything other than a website that might have something to do with the word buy.
Generic domains have all sorts of other value, and you can make lots of money without a good brand. But... Branding is about one thing only... Associating your name as the "Go-To" folks in a category. That association is simply not possible with a generic name.
Both are words in common usage and very relevant to their respective fields.
Another way of putting that is "unique"—and unique names are very valuable, both classically for establishing identity, but even more so these days: You want google searches for your name to end up on your site, not giving vague "everything on the internet" results.
Of course the real reason here is that Rakuten is an enormous steamroller in Japan (basically: Japan's version of Amazon), and if they're going to consolidate, they're hardly going to change the familiar name that's accompanied their success, especially not for some vague generic term.
[Recently I've happened to read various stories on "inc.com" and they've all been absolutely idiotic. Does anybody actually read this site?!]