Hello, Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that Facebook the company is changing its name to Meta to reflect its growing focus on the metaverse.
“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first, not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said at the company’s annual Connect conference Thursday.
Facebook changed its name to Meta, It is a major rebranding effort, . The company said it would better “encompass” what it does as it forays into newer horizons like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality and smart glasses.
The change of name will only be applicable only to its parent company and will not make impact on individual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
Major reason behind the rebranding exercise follows a string of controversies following Facebook amid leaking of internal documents by an ex-employee Frances Haugen who accused the company of putting “profits over safety”.
In his live-streamed virtual augmented reality conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new reflects its focus on building the “metaverse” platform.
“In the metaverse, you’ll 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 really fit how we think about computers or phones today,” said CEO Zuckerberg in Founder’s Letter 2021.
The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build, it added.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we’ve learned and help build the next chapter,” Zuckerberg said.
The change will bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. ‘Metaverse’ was first coined in a dystopian novel three decades ago refers to a virtual world that can be accessed by using different devices.
“The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. It’s a collective project that will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone. You’ll be able to socialize, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond what’s possible today, Facebook said.
The company also unveiled a new logo —a blue infinity symbol — that replaced the iconic thumbs-up sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
