(empo-tymshft) No, no, no! Using Facebook as your corporate identity is NOT a new innovation

Louis Gray shared this item from Eran Hammer-Lahav ("The Growing Web Identity Crisis, Courtesy of Facebook"), but I couldn't get past the end of the first paragraph.

A concerning trend is showing up in recent TV and print advertisements of companies using their Facebook profile pages as their web identity instead of their own domains. Most of these companies are big corporations with a well-established web presence. Using social networks to connect with consumers and promote brands is not new, but using these identities as the primary corporate web identity is new.

Um, no it's not.

Remember AOL keywords?

I wrote about this in 2009.

Jason Kottke wrote about this in 2007.

Everything is cyclical, turn, turn, turn.

And this re-emergence of the AOL-like environment on Facebook is being done for the same reasons - if you want your users to find your stuff, it's easier to set up a page on Facebook rather than to tell them to type in a separate URL (rhymes with curl) and put in all that http double dot slash slash stuff. Let's face it, if referrer URLs give you the willies, then you're not going to be necessarily concerned about the ramifications of going to facebook.com/superproduct rather than superproduct.com.