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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

I understand where you're coming from, but saying "a facebook" is not stupid, it's just efficient communication. Does saying "a facebook profile" convey any more bits of information to the average message recipient? IMO, to the average person, that would sound as stupid as "can I borrow a pencil with graphite from you?" It's unnecessarily descriptive.

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It's a testament to their lack of product diversity. No one would say "My Microsoft" or "My Google" or "My Valve" or "My Betty Crocker" because those companies have many credible products. "My Facebook" means "My Facebook account" because the whole company is nothing but a message board.

For serious products, this isn't the case. You might say "My Ford", and everyone would know you're talking about a car, but a car is considerably more significant than a username/password to a message board.

Same problem: I used to work with people who would say "Can you send it to me in Adobe?" or "Do you have Adobe installed?" to mean PDF or Adobe Acrobat.

Adobe still had a dozen products back then, but they had one "consumer" product and the rest were for pros or creatives.

I'd send them a .psd and then act surprised when they couldn't open it.

A friend who did Tech Support Hell while he was in college used to get irked at "my Internet don't (sic) work".

Google has more than one product, but one of their products is nevertheless called Google (the one that's at "google.com"; the referent of the verb "google"; etc.). Internally/formally it may be called "Search" but I dare say most of it's users call it "Google" (they might say "I did a Google search" but not "I used Google Search").

That's different. People may say it's "on Google", or "I used Google", but they don't say "I have a Google".

Now wonder how disorienting it is to work at one of those companies. I believe Amazon gets around this by liberally using the phrase "retail website" to refer to what the rest of the world just calls "Amazon".

"Pencil with graphite" is redundant. "Facebook" and "Facebook account" are two entirely different things. You don't say "I have a Bank of America" do you?

If efficiency is that important, say "I'm on Facebook" or "I'm not on Facebook". One fewer syllable than "I have a Facebook".

I have a Facebook (account).

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