In a major rebrand, Facebook announced that it has changed its corporate name to Meta. We reported about this a couple of weeks ago, and now it has finally happened.
According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the new name reflects the company’s goals on building a “metaverse” — a virtual world where people can interact, work, play, and communicate with others.
The closest reference I can think of that embodies the concept is the OASIS from the book/movie Ready Player One.
In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.
Zuckerberg adds that their mission remains the same — bringing people together. The rebrand refocuses the company as a metaverse-first, not Facebook-first, organization, with all of their products, including the apps, now sharing the same vision of bringing the metaverse to life.
As for Facebook, it has been relegated as a subsidiary, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp. The company has also announced that it will begin trading under the stock name MVRS starting December 1.
Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.
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The word “meta” comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”. The term “metaverse” was coined by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world that users enter to escape the real world.
If you have some time for an hour of watching, you can check out Facebook’s keynote here.
Source Facebook
