The rebranding was unveiled by the corporation during Facebook Connect and announced on Thursday that it has changed Facebook name to Meta.
At his company’s Connect event on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the new Facebook name will be Meta. “We are a firm that creates technology to connect,” Zuckerberg explained. “We can finally put humans at the heart of our technology if we work together.” And by working together, we can create a far larger creative economy.”
“To represent who we are and what we aim to build,” he continues. He claims that the word Facebook does not adequately capture all the firm does now and is still primarily associated with one product. “However, I hope that in time, we will be recognized as a metaverse firm.”
Zuckerberg owns the Twitter account @meta (whose tweets are currently shielded) and meta.com, which now leads to a Facebook welcome page describing the changes. Previously, the site referred to meta.org, a biomedical research discovery engine developed by the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative. That’s a component of the nonprofit arm Zuckerberg co-founded in 2015 with his medical wife, Priscilla Chan. The organization announced in a Medium article on Thursday that Meta.org would be decommissioned on March 31st, 2022.
According to The Verge, the rebranding is part of the firm’s efforts to pivot away from being recognized just as a social network company and toward Zuckerberg’s goals for establishing the metaverse. In July, he told The Verge that Facebook will “essentially shift from people perceiving us as primarily being a social media business to being a metaverse company” over the next several years.
In a blog post published Thursday, Zuckerberg stated that the company’s organizational structure will not change, but how it presents financial results would. “Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs” he explained. “We also intend to start trading under the new stock ticker we have reserved, MVRS, on December 1. Today’s announcement does not affect how we use or share data.”
Mr. Zuckerberg stated that developing the metaverse would need collaboration among many technological businesses, new kinds of governance, and other features that would not be available in the near future. He did, however, list numerous areas where the metaverse may be useful, including video games, fitness, and job.
Facebook has come under fire in recent weeks following revelations based on damning internal documents provided to the Wall Street Journal by whistleblower Frances Haugen, which revealed, among other things, that Facebook’s Instagram platform had become a toxic place for teenagers, particularly girls. And, as public faith in the social media platform dwindles, antitrust officials are urging the corporation to be split up.
Several news sites released further details about the internal papers submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission and handed to Congress in redacted form on Monday. They demonstrated Facebook’s researchers’ significant worry that its user base was aging and that the network was losing traction with younger generations. The data also revealed that Facebook has a tiered structure in place to determine which nations would receive greater election security.
Early conjecture centered on a rebranding akin to Google’s announcement in 2015 that it will become one of several firms under the umbrella of a larger holding company called Alphabet. For Facebook, the original “blue” app would join Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus under a parent company.
Following Thursday’s presentation, however, CTO Andrew Bosworth said that Meta will be phasing off the Oculus logo. The Oculus Quest product line will be renamed Meta Quest, and the Oculus App will be renamed Meta Quest.
Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, spoke before a Senate Commerce subcommittee on October 5th about Facebook, Instagram, and the dangers of engagement-focused algorithms.
