Facebook’s corporate entity now ‘Meta’
After 17 years of being called Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus has a new name, reports TechCrunch, adding that Facebook’s corporate entity is now Meta.
Facebook creator 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, adds TechCrunch.
“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.”
“Ultimately, 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,” adds TechCrunch.
According to the MIT Technology Review: “In contrast to what we typically think of as the internet, a metaverse is a 3D immersive environment shared by multiple users, in which you can interact with others via avatars. A metaverse can, with the support of the right technology, feel like real life, with all the usual elements of work, play, trade, friendship, love—a world of its own.
