Facebook updates to Meta

The Future. Facebook is no longer Facebook. It’s Meta. The rename is Mark Zuckerberg’s way of telling onlookers that Facebook is focused on becoming a metaverse company… and changing the narrative from all that bad press the company has been receiving lately. But like Google creating parent company Alphabet to avoid antitrust concerns, Facebook’s rebrand may be too late to make enough of a real-world difference.

New chapter
Facebook’s trying on a new look.

• The social platform is changing its company name to Meta.
• It’s a nod to Zuckerberg’s ambition to transform Facebook into a “metaverse” company — an interconnected digital space populated by avatars.
• Facebook… err… Meta plans to release a social platform called Horizon (already in beta), an in-world e-commerce platform with AR/VR devices to access all of it.
• The hope is that the new direction will attract a younger user base — Meta’s new “North Star.”
• And for those holding stock, the company will trade under the ticker MVRS starting December 1st.

Zuckerberg also announced a slate of upcoming new products from its Reality Labs division, including a high-end AR/VR headset called “Project Cambria,” an Oculus-focused metaverse platform called “Horizon Home,” and a mixed reality platform called “Presence Platform.”

Oh, and Grand Theft Auto is also coming to VR, which is sure to raise some eyebrows.

More than your face
At the company’s annual developer conference, Zuckerberg said, “We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. [But] building the foundational platforms for the metaverse will be a long road. Later in this decade is when we would sort of expect this to be more of a real business story.” With so many competitors building in the space — Microsoft, Epic Games, Roblox — we’ll see if he’s right.

At least Zuckerberg will have an army behind him. Recently, the company announced that it would be hiring 10,000 workers in Europe in the next five years to get the metaverse platform up on its feet.