According to the American technology media The Verge, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building a "meta universe."
According to reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) plans to discuss the company's name change at the company's annual connection meeting on October 28, but it may be announced earlier, with the purpose of showing that the technology giant His ambition is not only known for social media. After rebranding, the company may position the Facebook application as one of the many products under the parent company, which is responsible for overseeing groups such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.
Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware such as AR glasses, and Zuckerberg believes that these hardware will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July of this year, he told The Verge that in the next few years, “we will effectively transition from what people think we are primarily a social media company to becoming a meta-universe company.”
Rebranding also helps to further distinguish Zuckerberg's future work from the strict scrutiny that Facebook is currently receiving due to the way its social platform operates. A former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a large number of harmful internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal and testified before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the United States and elsewhere are trying to break up Facebook, and public trust in the way Facebook operates is declining.
Facebook is not the first well-known technology company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google undertook a complete reorganization under a holding company called Alphabet, in part to show that it is no longer just a search engine, but a large conglomerate with companies that manufacture self-driving cars and health technologies. Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc. in 2016, and in the same year it began to call itself a "camera company" and launched its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses for the first time.
According to reports, Facebook’s new company name is a tight secret within it, not well known, even among all its senior leaders. One possible name may be related to "Horizon", which is the name of the unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing over the past few years. Shortly after Facebook demonstrated a collaborative version of the workplace called Horizon Workrooms, the name of the app was recently adjusted to Horizon Worlds.
IT Home learned that Facebook has been steadily laying the foundation for paying more attention to next-generation technologies. Last summer, the company established a dedicated meta universe team. Recently, the company announced that Andrew Bosworth, the head of AR and VR, will be promoted to chief technology officer. And just a few days ago, Facebook announced plans to recruit another 10,000 employees in Europe to work on metadata.
Zuckerberg said this summer: “Metacosm will be a big focus. I think this will be an important part of the next chapter of the Internet development method after the mobile Internet. I think this will also be our company's next chapter. An important chapter, really redouble our efforts in this field."
However, even though Facebook has been vigorously promoting the concept of metaverse in recent weeks, metaverse is still not a widely understood concept. The term was originally coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson to describe the virtual world where people escape from a utopian real world.