Facebook plans to rename the company

Mark Zuckerberg wants to be known for building the metaverse

Facebook plans to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The upcoming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on Oct. 28, but which could be unveiled earlier, is intended to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than just social media and all the ills that come with it. . The rebranding would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company that oversees groups such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and more. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on this story.

Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware such as AR glasses that Zuckerberg says will eventually become as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that in the coming years “we will effectively transition from people seeing us primarily as a social media company to a metaverse company.”

A rebranding could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a wealth of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere are trying to break up the company, and public confidence in the way Facebook does business is waning.

Facebook is not the first well-known technology company to change its corporate name as its ambitions grow. In 2015, Google completely reorganized itself under a holding company called Alphabet, in part to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making self-driving cars and health technology. And Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it began calling itself a “camera company” and debuted its first Spectacles glasses.

I am told that Facebook’s new company name is a well-kept secret within its walls and not widely known even among its entire senior leadership. One possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years. The name of that app was recently changed to Horizon Worlds, shortly after Facebook demonstrated a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms.

Zuckerberg’s comments aside, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on next-generation technology. Last summer, it established a dedicated metaverse team. More recently, it announced that its head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to Chief Technology Officer. And just a few days ago, Facebook announced plans to hire an additional 10,000 employees to work on the metaverse in Europe.

The metaverse will be “a big focus, and I think this will just be a big part of the next chapter for how the Internet evolves beyond the mobile Internet,” Zuckerberg told Casey Newton of The Verge this summer. “And I think it will also be the next big chapter for our company, really doubling down in this area.”

Complicating matters is that although Facebook has heavily promoted the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks, it is still not a concept that is widely understood. The term was originally coined by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world to which people escape from a dystopian, real world. Now it is being adopted by one of the world’s largest and most controversial companies – and it will have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.

Source: theverge