The company’s new name indicates that it wants to be the face of the metaverse.
Facebook, Inc. is now Meta Platforms, Inc. — Meta for short. At an event on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is rebranding itself and focusing on building the “metaverse,” a simulation in which people interact as avatars in real time. This new name signifies that Facebook doesn’t want to just build this new, digital environment. It wants to be the face of it, too. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said at Facebook Connect, the company’s virtual and augmented reality developer conference. “As our new brands start showing up in our products, I hope that people come to know the Meta brand and the future that we stand for.” We don’t know the full backstory behind Meta’s new branding, which includes a logo that looks like a twisted infinity sign. When announcing the new name, Zuckerberg explained that he liked Meta because it’s a Greek word that “symbolizes there’s always more to build.” Perhaps coincidentally, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy Zuckerberg founded with his wife, Priscilla Chan, acquired a startup called Meta that uses AI to aggregate scientific research, though the project’s website says it’s a separate entity from Facebook. Meta’s most obvious connotation, of course, is with the metaverse itself. Aside from Zuckerberg’s big name announcement, this year’s Connect Conference focused on explaining how the metaverse and the technology that powers it will actually work. Through a series of colorful and highly animated demonstrations, the presentation focused on how people might play games, go to work, exercise, and even study in a virtual, three-dimensional environment, whenever it goes live.
