Facebook has officially changed its name to Meta, to fit with Zuckerberg’s idea for his company’s future. All this talk of the Metaverse and El Zuck’s grandiose plan to integrate a vision of the internet that’s present in Snow Crash and Ready Player One (both incidentally, being post-apocalyptic novels) don’t necessarily explain what Facebook rebrand will mean to you, the actual users in the short-term.
The short answer is nothing. Facebook will exist as it is currently, so does everything else that’s connected to it, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp services. To put it in an easily digestible term, Facebook is doing what Google did a few years ago: changing the name of the company (in this case, Facebook) into Meta, whose products and apps are now directly under it (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.).
While there are parallels to be had between Facebook’s Meta rebrand VS what Google did back in 2015, the main difference here is that Zuckerburg isn’t stepping away from Facebook, unlike what the Google founders did when they established Alphabet, the holding company that controls Google. Quite the opposite actually – Zuckerburg wants to be involved in the vision of the internet lifted from the pages of Ready Player One – without the post-apocalyptic nastiness.
In that world, people are fully immersed in a 3D version of the internet which has essentially integrated itself into people’s lives even more than what’s going on now. Facebook’s Oculus acquisition puts them in a great position to realize that goal. Also included in his Metaverse vision are crypto technologies like NFTs and the like, though he hasn’t really elaborated on these moving forward.
But it’ll be rough sailing for Zuck and co. Revelations by a Facebook whistleblower and internal leaked documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” show just how much the company knew about its gigantic misinformation problem and how little resources it devoted to combating it. There are calls for the US government to break up Facebook, which obviously will have a gigantic impact on what the company wants to achieve with its Metaverse vision.
Right now Facebook’s name change won’t directly affect you. Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram will still work as normal, and you’ll still go about your day-to-day without a care in the world. But if Zuck’s vision for the future is realized, we’re all in for a wild ride in his metaverse in the next few years, though it remains to be seen if that’s a good or a bad thing.
