Facebook, the social media platform networking friends, family, associates and enabling businesses to reach more customers globally has changed its name to Meta.
The new phase for the platform will be focused on virtual reality.
This was disclosed on Thursday by the company’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in a presentation at Facebook’s Connect conference, held virtually.
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“The metaverse is the next frontier.
“From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first,” Zuckerberg said.
According to Bloomberg Business, the new name won’t affect how the company uses or shares data, and the corporate structure isn’t changing.
Apps including the flagship social network, Instagram and WhatsApp will also keep their monikers.
The company said its stock will start trading under a new ticker, MVRS, on December 1.
The name change is the most definitive signal so far of the company’s intention to stake its future on a new computing platform — the metaverse, an idea born in the imaginations of sci-fi novelists.
In Meta’s vision, people will congregate and communicate by entering virtual environments, whether they’re talking with colleagues in a boardroom or hanging out with friends in far-flung corners of the globe.
The erstwhile Facebook is hoping to parlay its social-media user base, comprising more than 3 billion people globally, into an audience that will embrace immersive digital experiences through devices powered by augmented and virtual reality software, a business already being aggressively pursued by Meta and its rivals.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked with one product that can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today,” Zuckerberg said, “let alone in the future.”
Zuckerberg pledged that the metaverse will have privacy standards, parental controls and disclosures about data use that his social network has famously lacked.
“Everyone who’s building for the Metaverse should be focused on building responsibly from the beginning,” Zuckerberg said during a video presentation on Thursday.
“This is one of the lessons I’ve internalized from the last five years — that you really want to emphasize these principles from the start.”
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