San Francisco: CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company Facebook has changed its corporate name to Meta.

“To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta,” he said on Thursday.

Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses, the company said in an announcement.

“The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world,” it said.

According to the announcement, it’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, ushering in a new chapter for the company.

The former Facebook sign now reads Meta Vjeran Pavic The Verge

“The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build,” Zuckerberg wrote in a founder’s letter.

“From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services,” he added.

Zuckerberg owns the Twitter handle @meta (whose tweets are protected as of this writing) and meta.com, which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook outlining the changes. The site previously redirected to meta.org, a biomedical research discovery tool that was a project of the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative. That’s part of the philanthropic arm Zuckerberg co-founded with his physician wife, Priscilla Chan, in 2015. In a Medium post on Thursday, the group says it’s sunsetting Meta.org on March 31st, 2022.

As The Verge first reported on October 19th, the rebrand is part of the company’s efforts to shift gears away from being known as just a social media company and focus on Zuckerberg’s plans for building the metaverse. In July, he told The Verge that over the next several years, Facebook would “effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post Thursday that the company’s corporate structure would not be changing, but how it reports financial results will. “Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs” he explained. “We also intend to start trading under the new stock ticker we have reserved, MVRS, on December 1. Today’s announcement does not affect how we use or share data.”

According to Zuckerberg, the world is at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s also the next chapter for the company.

The company confirmed that its corporate structure is not changing. However, starting with financial results for the fourth quarter of 2021, the company plans to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs.

Zuckerberg expressed his hope 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.

What is the metaverse, and do I have to care?

Facebook has been under intense scrutiny over the past several weeks, after revelations based on damning internal documents provided to the Wall Street Journal by whistleblower Frances Haugen showed, among other things, that Facebook’s Instagram platform had become a toxic place for teenagers, especially girls. And antitrust regulators are pushing for the company to be broken up, as public trust in the social media platform is flagging.

References:

theverge.com - By Kim Lyons @SocialKimLy
goachronicle.com - GC NewsDesk
qz.com - By Scott Nover