New name rumors surfaced
Failures, data scandals, election manipulation, endangering the mental health of young people – the name “Facebook” has been associated with all sorts of bad news lately. Maybe that’s why Mark Zuckerberg wants to announce a name change for Facebook Inc. on October 28th. Perhaps the group also wants to discard the image of the pure social media group and reorganize itself under the name “Metaverse”. That reported at least the US tech magazine The Verge. On Wednesday, the Facebook CEO announced in his own profile a possible name change for Facebook Connect, which will take place on Thursday.
The group understands the name “Metaverse” as a world made up of reality and virtuality. For years, Facebook has been making great efforts in the future fields of VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality). Mark Zuckerberg has long been talking about the fact that in the future people will no longer meet in social networks, but in virtual spaces. His dream: a modern second life. The group recently announced that it would create 10,000 jobs in Europe.
The German Press Agency dpa has now thrown another possible term for a new name into the room: A hot candidate for the new name is simply just “Meta” without any “verses”. The internet domain meta.com currently redirect to the website meta.org around. According to the dpa, this is the homepage of a biomedical research project that was developed under the direction of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan founded this organization.
US media have now brought “Horizon” to the scene. Behind this is a virtual reality platform that was specially developed for the Oculus and – as part of the efforts of Mark Zuckerberg – already sums up the tech giant’s mission: It was the attempt to start an immersive virtual world. Of course, there is also a lot of advice on Twitter: “FB” is among them, and many believe that a return to “The Facebook” is possible. Although these speculations are rather unlikely.
Google has already proven that large tech companies can sometimes outgrow and surpass themselves. The digital group combines various business areas, from Internet services and trade to advertising, software development, health, biotechnology, investment and – of course – technology. In 2015, the parent company therefore reorganized itself under “Alphabet”. This should make it clear that the group is more than just a search engine.
Mark Zuckerberg is now likely to pursue a similar plan with Facebook Inc. How the group will actually be called in the future has not yet been finally announced. “Metaverse” is not confirmed. In addition to Facebook, various other subsidiaries are likely to form under the future name of the parent company. The company owns the social network Facebook, the video and photo sharing app Instagram, the messenger Whatsapp and Oculus VR, a manufacturer of virtual reality hardware.
The social network Facebook has made few changes since it was founded. Apart from minor redesigns, neither the product nor the brand core has changed much since 2004. Many attempts to renew the network came to nothing. In 2018, the “Explore Feed”, a second news feed, was switched off again. The content did not come from friends or subscribed sites, but from an algorithm that had evaluated the interests of the users. The function was only active for four months.
Mark Zuckerberg has always made the biggest innovations for his social network Facebook in the newsfeed algorithm himself. Sometimes link posts from media companies were more preferred, then picture posts from private contacts. Most recently, the company has increasingly taken action against fake news sites. A so-called blacklist ensured that status updates from known conspiracy sites, for example, were cut off. Facebook responded to public criticism.
