Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the company he founded in 2004 while studying at Harvard is no longer called Facebook, but Meta.
Facebook, the social network, will continue to exist with the same name. But Facebook, the company – the owner of Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and Facebook itself – has changed its name, logo, and brand identity.
In other words: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are now developed under the Meta umbrella, not Facebook. And what is better: neither these nor the applications that are developed in the future, will require you to have a Facebook account to use them.
(By the way, Oculus will also change its name to Meta, and the Oculus Quest virtual reality headsets will be renamed Meta Quest.)
Meta comes at the most opportune moment when the company is going through one of its worst image crises due to Facebook Papers: leaks of a former employee named Frances Haugen that exploded with an internal document that suggested that Instagram can exacerbate suicidal ideas in teenage girls and that later they focused on how the social network spreads hate speech and disinformation while enriching itself by serving advertising to users.
Also read: How to publish posts from your browser to Instagram?
But Zuckerberg did not refer to Facebook Papers when he announced Facebook’s new name. Meta, whose logo is a stylized M in the shape of infinity, refers to the “metaverse” that the company wants to build on its mixed reality platform in the coming years.
What the director of Facebook … sorry, of Meta, plans, is to lead the creation of a new great social platform called metaverse in which companies of all kinds will develop games and applications for communication, sports, entertainment, education, and work of the future. A Second Life in a big way. Or for young people to understand, a Habbo Hotel, but in mixed reality. Or for the youngest to understand, an immersive Roblox.
To start moving the metaverse, Facebook has announced new mixed reality development tools and has set aside $ 150 million for developers creating new types of immersive learning applications and programs. The company also announced Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was in development for Oculus Quest 2, a virtual reality headset. This teaser is meant to draw new users.
At the Facebook Connect event, Zuckerberg presented Horizon Workrooms, a virtual conference room to work remotely with office colleagues, and Horizon Worlds, a social network to meet people from other parts of the world in virtual environments to talk or play.
“Over time, I hope we will be seen as a metaverse company,” said Zuckerberg, proposing a future in which the phone is not the center of our online experience, but admitting that many of the ideas announced today will not make it into our lives. for a few years.
The success of the metaverse, Zuckerberg admitted, depends on attracting others to create new apps and programs that work on the same metaverse, just as Windows Phone didn’t succeed because it didn’t have all the apps that iOS and Android users enjoy.
When it comes to renaming a company as large as Facebook, it has an obvious precedent. In 2015, Google was restructured under a new parent company called Alphabet, which brings together other companies such as Fitbit, Wing, and Waymo. However, much of the press continues to use “Google” to refer to Alphabet without confusing readers.
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