Yesterday, during the annual “Facebook Connect” conference, the CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the new name of the company: Meta.
From Facebook to Meta, the changes in the new name
The social network, the website and the app do not change their name, and will always remain “Facebook”, but the company that owns and manages them is changing its name to highlight a repositioning in the most blatant way possible.
The new name will be “Meta”, the first part of “metaverse”.
The ticker of Facebook’s Nasdaq stock will also change from the current FB to MVRS, the abbreviation for metaverse.
The stock will therefore remain the same, with the same value and the same exchange markets, only with a different name. The ticker change will be effective as of December 1, but the exact date of the company name change, and thus of the stock, is not yet known.
The new company, Meta, will continue to own the two social networks Facebook and Instagram, as well as the messaging app WhatsApp and the Oculus augmented reality visor division, but will mainly focus on developing its own metaverse and the virtual reality market.
Passion for the metaverse
Zuckerberg reportedly believes that the metaverse could potentially be the successor to the mobile internet, which made Facebook and Instagram so successful, because it will allow people to feel as if they are there in person with other users, regardless of physical distance.
He said:
“We’ll be able to express ourselves in new joyful, completely immersive ways”.
The decision to change the name had already been widely announced in recent days, because the current name is too closely linked to the social network and the numerous problems the company has had in the past. In addition, the name change also allows the company to clearly reposition itself on the market.
In the past, Google, for example, changed the name of the company to Alphabet, leaving the name of its services unchanged, foremost the well-known search engine.
The reasons for the new name
According to Zuckerberg, the company’s brand is currently closely linked to a specific product that alone can no longer represent everything the company is doing.
During the conference, the co-founder and CEO appeared to be firmly at the helm of the company, denying all the numerous rumours that he was resigning after numerous requests to do so came mainly from politics and the press. Zuckerberg has once again shown that he does not give particular credence to the numerous rumours circulating, especially online, and that he is going his own way.
He also explained that, although the company is still basically seen as a social media company, in its DNA it is a company that builds technology to connect people. The metaverse is simply the next frontier in that sense, just as social networks were when Facebook started in 2004.
He added:
“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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