Is Facebook changing to Meta? All about the new name of Facebook Inc, Meta, that everyone needs to know.
Facebook has changed its name to Meta, the social media giant announced at its annual conference on augmented reality and virtual reality technology Thursday, 28 October 2021 at Connect 2021.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Meta, which brings together the then Facebook Inc. apps and technologies under one new company brand. Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.
The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world. It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company. Mark shared more about this vision in a founder’s letter.
The term “metaverse” comes from science fiction and has been popularized by venture capitalists in recent years as a way to talk about interconnected services.
Zuckerberg said that the name “meta” was inspired by his love of the classics and that it comes from the Greek word “beyond.” “For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story.”
For the time being, Facebook’s name change seems aspirational. A company that Zuckerberg launched from a college dorm room 17 years ago has become a conglomerate encompassing WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and a nascent payments and hardware business, leading some experts and insiders to say that the company was long overdue for a name change.
But virtually all of Facebook’s revenue — $29 billion in the third quarter — comes from online advertising produced by the core blue Facebook app, meaning that any transition to virtual reality focused on the sale of hardware would take enormous investment and many years.
With that said, Why is Facebook now meta? What does Facebook Meta mean? read till the end for a compiled interesting facts by The Vibely about Facebook company’s name change.
1. Facebook changed its company name to reflect its focus on building the metaverse “a virtual world”.
Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta on Thursday, moving aggressively to distance itself from a social-media business embroiled in crisis and rebrand itself as a forward-looking creator of a new digital world known as the “metaverse.” Zuckerberg characterized Facebook’s branding change as the consequence of its already publicly outlined shift toward fostering the so-called metaverse.
In a 75-minute online presentation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged users to adjust their thinking about the company, which he said had outgrown its ubiquitous and problematic social media app — a platform that will continue to be known as Facebook. Instead, he said, the company plans to focus on what Zuckerberg described as the next wave of computing: a virtual universe where people will roam freely as avatars, attend virtual business meetings, shopping in virtual stores, and socialize at virtual get-togethers.
“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said at Connect, the company’s annual event focused on virtual and augmented reality. “Facebook is one of the most used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”
The move comes as Facebook is mired in controversy over allegations that it has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions, and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content. After a whistleblower this month turned over tens of thousands of internal company documents to Congress and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, lawmakers and critics have called for urgent action to rein in the tech giant.
2. Facebook’s New Metaverse Project is rumored to Cost ‘Billions’ Of Dollars
Facebook has newly put a ten-figure price tag on its efforts to conquer the metaverse.
Facebook’s Chief Financial Officer David Wehner says it’ll cost several billion dollars for the company to work on the augmented- and virtual-reality technology to power a metaverse, an idea for a digital world that increasingly blurs the lines between physical reality and online experiences. Wehner made the comments in a conference call with analysts Wednesday evening, offering the first snapshot of how much it will cost Facebook to maneuver into this fledgling concept. (A little more specifically, Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney ballparks the number at around $5 billion.)
Facebook on Monday said the metaverse project would fall under the domain of Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook’s Reality Labs, a skunkworks within the social media firm. Bosworth said he hopes to create an experience where users could traverse from their physical surroundings to an all-encompassing digital world “with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.” To make this happen, Facebook currently has 700-plus openings on its job portal for AR and VR roles.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge earlier this week he sees the metaverse as “the successor to the mobile internet.” Facebook isn’t the only one interested in constructing the metaverse. The idea for such a place is popular especially among video game companies, most notably Epic Games’ Fortnite, which increasingly bears a resemblance to the metaverse-type worlds pictured in movies like The Matrix and Ready Player One. The metaverse “is certainly not something that anyone company is going to build,” Zuckerberg said, “but I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that.”
3. Meta Company comprises 7 Big Tech Apps like Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, others.
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. Meta as the parent company’s name will have other technologies/apps like Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal, Novi.
All the sub-Meta Tech companies operate on 5 basic principles. They are beliefs the company holds deeply and make tradeoffs to pursue.
- Give People a Voice: People deserve to be heard and to have a voice — even when that means defending the right of people we disagree with.
- Serve Everyone: Meta company works to make technology accessible to everyone, and our business model is ads so our services can be free.
- Promote Economic Opportunity: Meta tools level the playing field so businesses grow, create jobs, and strengthen the economy.
- Build Connection and Community: Meta services help people connect, and when they’re at their best, they bring people closer together.
- Keep People Safe and Protect Privacy: Meta companies have a responsibility to promote the best of what people can do together by keeping people safe and preventing harm.
4. Facebook now Meta company will hire/employ more people.
The company earlier this month unveiled plans to hire 10,000 people across the European Union for this purpose and may funnel billions of dollars into the efforts, according to Facebook’s Chief Financial Officer David Wehner.
But the reported changes are also coming at a time when the company’s business practices are under intense scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators worldwide. A recent series of reports published by The Wall Street Journal outlined issues like a reluctance to change the Facebook algorithm to reduce divisive content and misinformation and previously unpublished internal studies on the harmful impact of photo-sharing app Instagram on young users.
A former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, testified about these alleged problems before Congress earlier this month, accusing the company of putting “astronomical profits before people.” Facebook has in turn batted away many of these accusations, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg decrying Haugen’s testimony as a “false picture of the company.”
5. Facebook isn’t the first Silicon Valley company to rebrand itself.
Google changed its parent company’s name to Alphabet in 2015 in an attempt to unify a corporate behemoth that encompassed not only search-and-display advertising but also driverless cars and a life-sciences division. Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc. in an attempt to rebrand itself as a camera company.
Among them were the rebranding of Tobacco giant Philip Morris as Altria in 2003 and the multiple name changes initiated by Blackwater Worldwide, a private security company myred by controversy over its work in Iraq.
The racial justice protests that swept the nation last summer initiated a new wave of these changes as multiple companies ditched the names of brands criticized as offensive or insensitive, including popular syrup and pancake brand Aunt Jemima, which was re-named Pearl Milling Company, rice brand Uncle Ben’s, which is now known as Ben’s Original, and Eskimo Pie, which has become Edy’s Pie.