Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that the platform’s new name will be simply “Meta”. The new name was revealed during the social network’s self-titled Connect event. The new name comes more than a week after Zuckerberg’s announcement of the name change to the media.
As of this publication, Zuckerberg already owns the right to the official @meta Twitter account. To that end, clicking on the included link will redirect visitors to a Facebook page that explains the concept.
As per Zuckerberg’s blog post, he explains that the “Meta” name change is an abbreviation of the more familiar metaverse: a term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the Internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.
As a rough summary, Meta will focus on extending and enabling users to reach out across three technologies: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Smart Glasses. To that end, Zuckerberg says that Facebook will invest US$150 million (~RM622 million) in AR and VR training and resources for content creators who want to learn a new skill.
This probably bears repeating, but Facebook isn’t the first tech giant to rebrand itself. Back in 2015, Google renamed itself to Alphabet, which then became the parent company to the search engine, along with other products under the name.
Under that same concept, Facebook will simply become another “product” under the Meta umbrella, joining the ranks of other apps that include the previously acquired Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.
