Mark Zuckerberg on October 28, announced that Facebook is changing its name to Meta. According to the founder of Facebook, Meta brings together our apps and technologies under one new company brand. Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life as well as help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.
The metaverse is designed to feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will enable users to share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together and do things together you could not do in the physical world. Meta is the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company. Mark shares more about this in the founder’s letter.
Our annual Connect conference brings together augmented and virtual reality developers, content creators, marketers, and others to celebrate the industry’s momentum as well as growth. For this year’s virtual event, the focus was on what experiences in the metaverse could feel like over the next decade. Ranging from social connection to entertainment, gaming, fitness, work, education, and commerce. We also announced new tools which can help people build for the metaverse, including Presence Platform which will enable new mixed reality experiences on Quest 2, and a $150-million investment in immersive learning to train the next generation of creators.
Why Meta?
The concept behind Meta is to build technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. With the advent of Facebook in 2004, the way people connect was changed. Apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world to better connect with each other. Currently, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.
The rebrand is part of the company’s efforts to shift gears away from being seen and known as just a social media company and focus on Zuckerberg’s plans for building the metaverse. In July, Zuckerberg told The Verge that over the next several years, Facebook would “effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company”.
The Facebook change of name to Meta was accompanied by a new corporate logo designed like an infinity-shaped symbol that was slightly askew. However, Facebook and its other apps like Instagram and WhatsApp will remain but will be under the Meta umbrella.
This move punctuates how Mark Zuckerberg the CEO plans on refocusing his Silicon Valley company on what he sees as the next digital frontier – which is a unification of disparate digital worlds into something known as metaverse. Also renaming Facebook may help distance the company from the social networking controversies it is currently facing including how it is used in spreading hate speech and misinformation.
Mark Zuckerberg said as Facebook has committed to building a composite universe melding online, virtual, and augmented worlds that people can seamlessly traverse. According to him, this concept, called the metaverse, can be the next major social platform, and that several tech companies will build it over the next 10+ years.
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