Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s company title will be renamed to Meta.
Facebook Becomes Meta
The social media platform Facebook will keep its name, as will other company services and apps, while Meta will become the official name for the umbrella company that oversees Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Reality Labs and all its other subsets.
The official announcement follows on from a report from The Verge last week that indicated the change might be incoming and announced officially at Connect.
As we remarked last week, the move is not dissimilar to Google’s 2015 decision to rebrand their company title from Google to Alphabet. This was done to distinguish Google from the search engine and provide a more encompassing name for the umbrella company managing all of its services and products.
For Meta, the new name signals a shift towards the metaverse, which has been a big focus of Facebook’s recent VR/AR efforts and today’s Connect keynote. Currently the company brands its own social VR applications on platforms like the Oculus Quest as ‘Horizon’, including Horizon Home, Horizon Workrooms and Horizon Worlds.
Meta says that the name was chosen “because it can mean “beyond,” and captures our commitment to building social technologies that take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today.”
What do you make of the new Meta name? Let us know in the comments below!
