The owner of some of the biggest social media platforms in the world, Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced Meta, the new parent company of Facebook and its sister concerns like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Reality Labs (previously Oculus). According to Mark, the new name reflects his vision of building a metaverse. Differently put, this is being done to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network.
“As we embark on this next chapter, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity…Today, we are seen as a social media company. Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It is an iconic social media brand. To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I am proud to share that our company is now Meta,” Zuckerberg revealed.
This wasn’t really a surprise as the news about Facebook changing its name was doing rounds for the last few days.
The announcement for name change comes at a time when Facebook is under constant scrutiny for various scandals and lately, the harmful effect it has on teens and the public in general. However, Mark told The Verge that the negative stigma on the Facebook brand “had nothing to bear on this.” He strongly believes in what they are building and feels that technology can make life better.
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New Symbol
With a name change, there is a change in the sign of Facebook too. The company revealed a new sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California on Thursday, replacing its thumbs-up “Like” logo with a blue infinity shape.
How is the Facebook/Meta Brand expanding?
Facebook/Meta is investing heavily in building a Metaverse. The company claims that it will invest 10 billion dollars this year on Reality Labs to build a metaverse.
“Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we are building towards. From now on, we will be metaverse first, not Facebook first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for,” Zuckerberg said.
Metaverse aims to make user interactions more seamless. Going forward, users might get to create and customize their personal digital avatars and get into the so-called metaverse through multiple entry points. It won’t be just communication through apps, but VR, AR, and other computing platforms.
The company wants metaverse to be very accessible to people at large and for this, they might start selling devices at a subsidized cost. Even they might keep lower fees for developers and content creators.
“In the metaverse, you will be able to do almost anything you can imagine- get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create- as well as completely new experiences that don’t fit how we think about computers or phones today,” Zuck added.
“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Mark Zuckerberg said.
Name of Apps to remain same
The announcement of Facebook getting a new name made maximum people ask a very pertinent question, whether the working name of all its apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp change too? Well, there’s nothing to worry about in this department as the tech giant has made it clear that although the change will bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand, the corporate names of the apps would not undergo any change. That is the names of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger will remain the same.
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Twitter Reactions to the Meta Name Change
Post the announcement for a name change, the name Meta and Mark Zuckerberg both have been trending on Twitter. Twitterati believes that Zuckerberg is trying to distract the world from serious problems by this act. Some share the consensus that changing a name won’t solve the problems the app has.
Anyhoo, here are some of the reactions to the announcement:
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