UPDATED 21:39 EDT / NOVEMBER 04 2019

APPS

Facebook rebrands itself as FACEBOOK to clarify what apps it owns

In a move that has not been well-received in social media and elsewhere, social media giant Facebook Inc. has undertaken a corporate rebranding with a new logo that spells FACEBOOK in upper case.

The motivation for the rebranding is claimed by Facebook to make it clearer for people to know what products and apps it owns aside from the social networking site and app itself.

FACEBOOK-owned apps and services included Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra. FACEBOOK’s Facebook social networking service will retain its own Facebook (not all uppercase) original branding. [Editor’s note: SiliconANGLE will continue to use Facebook in lower-case when referring to the company, since conventional style calls for not using capital letters in names unless they stand for something.]

“The new branding was designed for clarity and uses custom typography and capitalization to create visual distinction between the company and app,” Antonio Lucio, FACEBOOK’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “This brand change is a way to better communicate our ownership structure to the people and businesses who use our services to connect, share, build community and grow their audiences.”

If Facebook now being all uppercase isn’t arguably strange enough, the new branding also comes with a shifting color scheme. The variable colors are said to reflect Facebook’s — sorry, FACEBOOK’s various apps and services.

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The rebranding decision has been met with some derision in the tech press. Chris Matysxzyk at ZDNet said that everyone is “giggling” at the new corporate FACEBOOK logo. The Verge jokingly headlined its coverage with “this new logo will surely solve all of Facebook’s problems.”

In practical terms, most users won’t notice the FACEBOOK branding unless they look carefully. One example given is that the new FACEBOOK logo will now appear at the bottom of the page when people log into Instagram.

Corporate rebranding among tech companies isn’t new. Google LLC famously changed its corporate name to Alphabet Inc. in 2015 while also changing the font it uses for its logo in the same year.

Images: Facebook

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