Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Instagram and WhatsApp has a new corporate name Meta as part of a major rebranding exercise.
The company has said that the exercise would encompass what it does, as as well as broadening its reach beyond social media into areas like virtual reality (VR).Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the change at the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event, sharing that the new title captured more of the company’s core ambition: to build the metaverse. This change does not apply to its individual platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, the name change is only for the parent company that owns them.
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either,” Zuckerberg said. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
The move follows a series of negative stories about Facebook, based on documents leaked by an ex-employee. Frances Haugen had accused the company of putting “profits over safety”.
Earlier in 2015, Google restructured its company calling its parent firm Alphabet, however, the name has not caught on.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name as he unveiled plans to build a “metaverse” – an online world where people can game, work and communicate in a virtual environment.
“Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards,” he said in a virtual conference.
“We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for our family of apps, and one for our work on future platforms. And as part of this, it is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do, to reflect who we are and what we hope to build.”
Meanwhile, the company also unveiled a new sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Thursday, replacing its thumbs-up “Like” logo with a blue infinity shape.
Mr Zuckerberg said the new name reflects that over time, users will not need to use Facebook to use the company’s other services. Facebook has said that it intends to start trading its shares under the new stock ticker MVRS from 1 December.
Meanwhile, in July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Verge profile that Facebook was betting it all on the metaverse. It was a surprise announcement for the trillion-dollar company, mainly because while Facebook has spent plenty of money and effort on virtual reality hardware, its social VR products have largely been short-lived failures and it had said barely anything about its beta Horizons social platform since announcing it more than a year-and-a-half earlier.
Also, in September, in a blog post called “Building the Metaverse Responsibly,” Facebook announced a $50 million fund dedicated toward investment in research “to ensure these products are developed responsibly.” This month, Facebook announced a smaller $10 million creator fund for developers on its nascent Horizon Worlds platform, and also detailed that it planned to hire a whopping 10,000 employees in the EU specifically to build out their metaverse platform.
Last week, a story in The Verge reported that Facebook was considering a name change to their corporate entity.
Eventually, distancing the company’s core business from a product associated with the most problems is an unsurprising move for them, but changing its name to Meta will require Facebook to align its core brand with a product that could be years from relevancy and could encounter many failures on the way to potential mainstream success. Facebook still has 2.5 billion users, while their metaverse products likely have a few thousand users, at most.
