Facebook’s parent company has changed its name to Meta and updated its logo to an infinity loop that resembles the letter M.
At the latest annual Facebook connect event, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media company has changed its name to Meta. The CEO also shared how its logo has been updated to a looping letter M.
According to the brand the name represents the company’s move further into the metaverse – a digital world where people can experience a parallel life to their real-world existence.
Both the name, which has been created in the company’s familiar 2019 typeface, and logo will be used within all apps owned by the company including Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger. They will also be used for its virtual reality brand Oculus, which the company acquired in 2014.
According to a letter Zuckerberg published on the brand’s blog, the company chose Meta because of its connotations with possibility and a future where there is “more to build”. The word translates to beyond in Greek.
We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too.
In recent decades, technology has given people the power to connect and express ourselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mostly typed text on websites. When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile.
As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line.
Zuckerberg sketched his plans to build the “metaverse” – a digital world built over our own, comprising virtual reality headsets and augmented reality.
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor of the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.”
Zuckerberg said he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade. He described futuristic plans to create a digital world, in which users will feel they are with one another and have a “sense of presence” despite being far apart.
The platform would allow users to customize their avatars and digital spaces, decorating a digital office with pictures, videos and even books. The presentation imagined users inviting friends over virtually, two people attending a concert together despite being across the world from one another, and colleagues making work presentations remotely.
“When I send my parents a video with my kids, they’re going to feel like they’re right in the moment with us not peering through a little window,” he said.
Yet he admitted the company has a long way to go.
“The best way to understand the metaverse is to experience it yourself,” Zuckerberg added, though “it doesn’t fully exist yet”.
Still, Zuckerberg said, Facebook rolled out two of its metaverse projects in beta last year: Horizon World, which allows users to invite friends over into their digital world, and Horizon Workrooms, which does the same in professional settings. He also said Facebook plans to further explore NFTs and crypto to help facilitate media that can be represented digitally, and is working on gaming applications.
Zuckerberg said the company would continue to offer services and hardwire to developers at low cost or for free, in an attempt to attract a critical mass of people to the platform. The company has also dedicated $150m to developers to create new apps, games and immersive programs in the metaverse.
“We want to serve as many people as possible, which means working to make our services cost less not more,” he said.
Critics of the platform contended on Thursday that the metaverse project is a distraction from the company’s PR crisis, and that the company risks making the same mistakes as it has in the past.
Others warned Facebook’s metaverse launch could mean a new space in which the company has a monopoly, amid ongoing antitrust concerns.
