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| Image credit - Facebook |
Well, it’s official. After 17 years of being called Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus has a new name. Facebook’s corporate entity is now Meta.
Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg announced the change at the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event, sharing that the new title captured more of the company’s core ambition: to build the metaverse.
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either,” Zuckerberg said. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
The name change comes at a… convenient time for Facebook, which has seen a sustained backlash to its brand, particularly in recent weeks after a former employee leaked a trove of documents to the media and government bodies detailing the missteps Facebook has made over the years in building out its platform responsibly. Facebook had been laying the groundwork for this change for months, seemingly in an effort to move its core branding further from the relentless negative headlines surrounding its most popular product, which has been a lightning rod for angst among consumers.
In July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Verge profile that Facebook was betting it all on the metaverse. It was a surprise announcement for the trillion-dollar company, mainly because while Facebook has spent plenty of money and effort on virtual reality hardware, its social VR products have largely been short-lived failures and it had said barely anything about its beta Horizons social platform since announcing it more than a year-and-a-half earlier.
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