Facebook's new name is going to be Meta

[spartaman64]

Quote

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at the company’s Connect event that the social media platform’s new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”

Quote

He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does. “Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product,” he said. “But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.”

Zuckerberg owns the Twitter handle @meta and meta.com, which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook that outlines the changes.

Quote

Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post Thursday that the company’s corporate structure would not be changing, but how it reports financial results will. “Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs” he explained. “We also intend to start trading under the new stock ticker we have reserved, MVRS, on December 1. Today’s announcement does not affect how we use or share data.”

source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/28/22745234/facebook-new-name-meta-metaverse-zuckerberg-rebrand

 

I guess that's one way of trying to get away from the bad PR they are having right now. But I feel like its sort of a bland name and the change is kind of unnecessary.

[poochyena]

Sounds similar to what google/alphabet did. meta is an odd company name though

[Fasterthannothing]

Yeah the Metaverse is awesome I've even invested in a company focused on the Metaverse. But c'mon changing your name to meta. It just kinda sounds cringe like "hey check out my meta post" or "Are you on meta?" Idk what do I know about marketing. I guess since they are so big already they could have called it anything they wanted and people would still know what it was. Besides if they are trying to spin their PR it's not working those same articles talk about how they changed their name because they weren't able to attract kids yikes!

[minibois]

Not even going into the name itself, I am just not familiar at all with the Facebook platform to know if it's a good fit or not.

I've always disliked names like this though. Meta is already a word, by Facebook now choosing to go with that name, looking up the word online is going to fill the result with irrelevant Facebook results.

 

Of course Facebook isn't the only company guilty of this (there is also Honey, Steam, Alphabet, etc.), it's just another example to add to the collection of "Companies who chose an already-existing word as their name, making online results muddled".

[Master Disaster]

10 minutes ago, poochyena said:

Sounds similar to what google/alphabet did. meta is an odd company name though

Actually its kind of a brilliant name, meta means self referencing and the entirety of social media is built around people referencing themselves.

[Distinctly Average]

Some more on the story - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59083601

[WhitetailAni]

 

Guarantee there will be angry senior citizens around the world.

[IAmAndre]

This is rather confusing. Is Meta the name of the company and Facebook being part of it, just like Google and Meta or is the social media actually being renamed Meta?

[Mark Kaine]

fb literally becoming a meme from few years ago. 

[poochyena]

4 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

This is rather confusing. Is Meta the name of the company and Facebook being part of it

yes

[Dominik W]

22 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

This is rather confusing. Is Meta the name of the company and Facebook being part of it, just like Google and Meta or is the social media actually being renamed Meta?

Remember when Google became Alphabet?

 

Basically the exact same thing.

Nothing really important.

[Dominik W]

55 minutes ago, poochyena said:

Sounds similar to what google/alphabet did. meta is an odd company name though

METAverse. Metaverse. Metadata. TBH it did surprise me that they named it that, I thought it'd be something else. But oh well.

[LAwLz]

So Facebook.com, the site called "Facebook" is not changing name. It's the parent company who owns facebook.com, formerly known as Facebook Inc, that is changing its name to meta platforms Inc. 

 

I can see why they did this. As Zuck said, having your company also be the name of your product is confusing and limiting. 

[tikker]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

So Facebook.com, the site called "Facebook" is not changing name. It's the parent company who owns facebook.com, formerly known as Facebook Inc, that is changing its name to meta platforms Inc. 

 

I can see why they did this. As Zuck said, having your company also be the name of your product is confusing and limiting. 

 

 

 

That makes this make so much more sense now. I was foreseeing so much chaos if the site rebranded.

[LiquidShortening]

I am reminded of Ron Artest changing his name to Meta Worldpeace trying to escape his reputation. It kinda worked… ? 

[Master Delta Chief]

Damage control much? Such a perfect time for them to change their company's name and announce a whole bunch of shit like that scuffed looking 'VRChat/Second Life' 

[Heliian]

Thanks, I hate it. 

 

Meta is one of the newest words to be overused incorrectly and it makes me cringe.  

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/28/22745234/facebook-new-name-meta-metaverse-zuckerberg-rebrand

 

I guess that's one way of trying to get away from the bad PR they are having right now. But I feel like its sort of a bland name and the change is kind of unnecessary.

My twitter timeline is full of takes like this:

As much as I hate the Facebook, or even the idea of Facebook having any role in anyones lives past 2025, it's pretty much a given that there will be people who just don't care.

 

Friends watched the the entire thing and were basically making "we got zuck blocked" type of comments because they only wanted to hear about new oculus equipment and there wasn't any.

 

The entire thing, was basically marketing of stuff they have been working on for the last 2 years, nothing particularly new. All this to launch a name they shouldn't have picked. I don't know if or how they managed to trademark "meta" since meta has a lot of uses on the web, going back to "meta tags" in html and "meta data" in photoshop jpeg's.

 

As for the portable avatars and mixed reality/AR/VR stuff itself. We've had avatars on the Wii and Xbox 360. There are vTubers today but have been around since at least 2016. None of this is breaking new ground. Just more of the same fluff we've been promised by Microsoft's Hololens and Google Glass which both became essentially vaporware with no general availability. 

 

If anything a lot of this VR/AR stuff continues to be perpetual vaporware because the hardware requirements to make it useful make it substantially out of reach of even high-end gamers, and to try and bring it down to game console levels of tech, leads to a poor overall experience. Like it's pretty ballsy to walk around a green screen PR movie, staring at an obvious teleprompter, when you're trying to market VR/AR holograms. They claim to have the tech to make realistic 3D avatars, so just bloody use that tech to make the film in the first place and demonstrate it as a practical use in real time.

 

[StDragon]

When you look into the Metaverse, it looks back.

 

Being a Glasshole isn't so hot anymore amiright?

[williamcll]

still not convinced to use facebook again.

[WolframaticAlpha]

facebook is a cancer and now it has metastasized in our society.

[That Franc]

Never used any service from Facebook, not going to use any service from Meta.

[RejZoR]

Who even uses Facebook apart from old people and those few who use it to either promote their company or just have that 1 or 2 distant relatives for which they use FB to communicate? No one of young people use it.

 

I've been on it out of curiosity like a century ago at this point and it was totally whatever. Everyone posting their wonderful lives and having 3000 "friends". Everything about it felt pretentious and stupid so I just deleted it one day. You know, back when you could actually delete it... And soon after I dumped Google entirely too and started caring about privacy some more. So I know now that I have to just avoid Meta too, just like I avoided Fecesbook all this time.

[oali24]

How fitting, like metadata, which is really what facebook and Zuckerberg want to know, the data around you and about you, they don't actually care about knowing you or helping anyone or taking responsibility for anything.

[Jeskspie]

it shoobedoby meta tho