At Thursday's Connect event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that Meta will be its new name. Zuckerberg stated that we are a company that creates technology to connect. We can put people at the heart of our technology together. Together, we can create a vastly larger creator economy.
He said that the name Facebook should reflect who we are as well as what we want to create. He stated that the name Facebook does not encompass all the company's current products and is only closely related to one product. However, I believe we will become a metaverse company over time.
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Zuckerberg is the owner of the Twitter handle @meta (whose Tweets are currently protected) and meta.com. The URL redirects to a Facebook welcome page that outlines the changes. The site was previously redirected at meta.org, which is a biomedical discovery tool and project of Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative. This is part of the philanthropic arm Zuckerberg founded with his wife, Priscilla, in 2015. The group announced in a Medium post that Meta.org will be ending on March 31, 2022.
The rebrand, which was first reported by The Verge on October 19, is part of Facebook's effort to move away from being just a social media company and instead focus on Zuckerberg's plans for the metaverse. He told The Verge in July that Facebook would become a metaverse company over the next few years.
In a blog post, Zuckerberg stated that while the company's corporate structure will not change, its reporting of financial results will. He explained that we will report on two operating segments, Family of Apps (and Reality Labs) starting with the fourth quarter of 2021. On December 1, we will also start trading under the new stock symbol, MVRS. This announcement will not change how we share or use data.
Facebook has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks. This is after revelations made by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, based on damning internal documents, revealed that Facebook's Instagram platform was becoming a dangerous place for teens, particularly girls. Antitrust regulators want the company to be dismantled as the public trust in the social media platform is declining.
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Multiple news outlets published additional details from the documents that were redacted and disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission. These documents showed deep concern by Facebook's researchers about the aging of its user base and how the platform was losing popularity among younger generations. These documents showed that Facebook had developed a system to prioritize which countries would be granted enhanced protections in elections.
Initial speculation was focused on a similar change to Google's 2015 rebrand. It announced that it would be one of many companies within a larger holding company called Alphabet. Facebook's original blue app would be joined by WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus as a parent company.
Following Thursday's event, Oculus received a revamp of its own. CTO Andrew Bosworth announced that Meta would be phasing out Oculus branding. The Oculus Quest product lines will be renamed the Meta Quest products, and the Oculus App the Meta Quest App. Bosworth stated that these changes will take effect in the early 2022.
