Puns aside... you can'd do social without having some kind of face. Facebook really has face(s) (puns aside again): it has Mark Z's friendly looking face, it h

Puns aside... you can'd do social without having some kind of face. Facebook really has face(s) (puns aside again): it has Mark Z's friendly looking face, it has the faces of all your friends and family that are already there, it has a warm-looking humane-looking brand (not with a damn mathematical sign like "+" in. its. freaking. name.), even the annoying-to-most-geeks UX has a "face" that you can recognize. Even when they do their ubercreepy stuff we all complain about, they do it with a face, you viscerally hate it or you get freaked out just like you would get freaked out by a stalker watching you naked... you don't just feel like your privacy is invaded by a mathematical equation. Facebook, the company, really feels like a "person" and not a "thing". (Yeah, to me at least it feels like an ubercreepy person for whom I want a restraining order and maybe a vicious guard dog too and few extra alarm systems to keep it as far away as possible... but it's still a "person"). And it's not a reaction, Facebook wan't born out of a reaction to MySpace, it "authentic" and people can feel this about a brand. That's why corporations can spend millions on buying a brand that "feels authentic" instead of "manufacturing a brand". Facebook started with a bunch of cool faces and a cool story. They even made a movie out of that story! And a totally shitty technical platform, but that didn't matter. The gargantuan effort to make Google+ succeed looked like some folks' effort to make Esperanto into the de-facto international language instead of English. You needed the literary face of a Shakespeare, and the military face of a British Empire to make a language succeed, an beneath them an authentic foundation (English was not invented as a reaction to Latin!).