Facebook has changed its corporate name to Meta as part of a major rebrand.
The company said it would better “encompass” what it does, as it broadens its reach beyond social media into areas like virtual reality (VR).
The change does not apply to its individual platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, only the parent company that owns them.
The move follows a series of negative stories about Facebook, based on documents leaked by an ex-employee.
Frances Haugen has accused the company of putting “profits over safety”.
In 2015, Google restructured its company calling its parent firm Alphabet, however, the name has not caught on.
Facebook isn’t the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand.
In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a holding company called Alphabet, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech.
And Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc.
in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a “camera company” and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.
I’m told that the new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership.
A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years.
The name of that app was recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration Called Horizon Workroom.
Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork
Aside from Zuckerberg’s comments, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on the next generation of technology.
This past summer it set up a dedicated metaverse team.
More recently, it announced that the head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to chief technology officer.
And just a couple of days ago Facebook announced plane to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe.
The metaverse is “going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton this summer.
“And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area.”
Complicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks, it’s 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 — and it’ll have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.