Read more: Trump ban decision shows the limits of a Facebook ‘Supreme Court’ĭoesn’t Facebook – sorry, Meta – have bigger things to worry about? “Is Meta going to simply provide the tools rather than be the gatekeeper? I doubt that they would relinquish anything that might compromise their position as the definitive advertisement provider of the metaverse, for instance,” says Van Kleek. Meta did make oblique references to Apple in its announcement, saying it wanted to avoid a single company restricting what you can do and charging high fees, but Max Van Kleek at the University of Oxford is sceptical that Meta itself will wield control over its metaverse. They want others to be prisoner on their platform.” “They don’t want to be prisoner on other people’s platform. “My suspicion is that this is about owning the operating system of the future, and Facebook’s experience of being an app on other people’s – rivals’ – operating systems,” says Anupam Chander at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC. Read more: Facebook vs Australia and the new battle to cut big tech down to sizeįor one thing, Meta doesn’t want to be known solely as a social media platform. The metaverse unveiled by the company in August looks like The Sims or another immersive world: the 2003 video game Second Life. “In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter announcing Facebook’s rebranding as Meta.īut it is in the future. The name was chosen to echo the key product that Zuckerberg hopes Facebook – now Meta – will be represented by: the metaverse, the name for a shared online 3D virtual space that a number of companies are interested in creating as a sort of future version of the internet. Facebook (the company) even changed the logo outside its building on 28 October. But the company that produces and maintains them will now be called Meta – similar to Google’s 2015 corporate restructuring into a parent company called Alphabet. In addition to the social network, that now includes Instagram, Messenger, its Quest VR headset, its Horizon VR platform and more.It is important to note that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram will all be keeping their names. In explaining the rebrand, Zuckerberg said the name Facebook no longer encompasses everything the company does. “Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable.”
“Changing their name doesn’t change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world’s leading peddler of disinformation and hate,” the group said in a statement. The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog group focused on the company, announced that it will keep its name. Some of Facebook’s biggest critics seemed unimpressed by the name change. The domain, meanwhile, redirected to the former Facebook’s rebranded corporate site.Īt headquarters in Menlo Park, California, the iconic thumbs up sign that has long been outside was repainted to a blue, pretzel-shape logo resembling an infinity symbol. In an interesting twist, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization run by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, bought a Canadian scientific literature analysis company called Meta in 2017.īy Thursday afternoon, though, its website announced that it will “sunset” at the end of March.
Zuckerberg, for his part, has largely dismissed the furor triggered by the Facebook Papers as unfair. A corporate rebranding isn’t likely to solve the myriad problems revealed by the internal documents or quiet the alarms that critics have been raising for years about the harm the company’s products are causing to society. The announcement comes amid heightened legislative and regulatory scrutiny of Facebook in many parts of the world because of the Facebook Papers.
Zuckerberg said that he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade and that he hopes the new technology will creates millions of jobs for creators. Other tech companies such as Microsoft, chipmaker Nvidia and Fortnite maker Epic Games have all been outlining their own visions of how the metaverse will work. The entity, Reality Labs, will reduce Facebook’s overall operating profit by about $10 billion this year, the company said. On Monday, Zuckerberg announced a new segment for Facebook that will begin reporting its financial results separately from the company’s Family of Apps segment starting in the final quarter of this year. Zuckerberg’s foray into virtual reality has drawn some comparisons to fellow tech billionaires’ outer space adventures and jokes that perhaps it’s understandable he would want to escape his current reality amid calls for his resignation and increasing scrutiny of the company.
0 kommentar(er)
