Facebook to Meta. Why did Facebook change its name?

Founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday 29th Oct that Facebook would change its corporate name to Meta, effectively demoting Facebook’s namesake service to one of its subsidiaries, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp, rather than the overarching brand.

The name change, which was announced by Zuckerberg during the company’s virtual reality and augmented reality conference Facebook Connect, aligns with its growing focus on the metaverse, which refers to efforts to combine virtual and augmented reality technologies in a new online realm.

“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“

-Zuckerberg

Facebook has invested heavily in augmented and virtual reality. With Meta, it would bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. It also mentioned that the corporate structure will remain unchanged.

What Exactly does the new name “Meta” mean?

Zuckerberg said the new name, coming from the Greek word for “beyond”, symbolized there was always more to build. Twitter Inc CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out a different definition “referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.”

Zuckerberg said the new name also reflects that users will not need to use Facebook to use the company’s other services over time.

There were also video demos of what the metaverse could look like. This also included features people connecting as avatars and transported to digital versions of various places. He said that the metaverse would need to be built with safety and privacy in mind.

The Vision behind Facebook to Meta

Facebook now Meta, which launched its pair of smart glasses with Ray-Ban this year, announced a slew of new AR and VR product updates during Connect. These included a way for people using its Oculus VR headset to call friends using Facebook Messenger. Also includes functionality for people to invite others to a social version of their home, dubbed “Horizon Home.”

Facebook is doing so as it shifts its focus to the “metaverse” and confronts wide-ranging scrutiny of the real-world harms from its various platforms. All of this after recently a whistleblower leaked hundreds of internal documents.

Conclusion

Complicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks. It is still not a concept that’s widely understood. The term was coined originally by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world. Now it’s being adopted by one of the world’s largest and most controversial companies. That’ll have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.