According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, Facebook plans to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse.
The upcoming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to discuss at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th but may reveal sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all of its ills.
The rebranding would most likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company that oversees groups such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and others. Facebook declined to comment for this story.
Facebook already employs over 10,000 people in the development of consumer hardware such as augmented reality glasses, which Zuckerberg believes will one day be as commonplace as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” over the next several years.
A rebranding could also serve to further distance Zuckerberg’s futuristic work from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently facing for the way its social platform operates today. Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified before Congress about them. Antitrust regulators in the United States and elsewhere are attempting to break up the company, and public trust in how Facebook conducts business is eroding.
Facebook is not the first well-known technology company to change its name as its ambitions grow. Google reorganized entirely under the Alphabet holding company in 2015, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech. In 2016, Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc., the same year it began referring to itself as a “camera company” and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.
According to my sources, the new Facebook company name is a closely guarded secret within the company’s walls and is not widely known, even among its full senior leadership. Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years, could be a possible name. The app’s name was recently changed to Horizon Worlds, shortly after Facebook demonstrated Horizon Workrooms, a version for workplace collaboration.
Apart from Zuckerberg’s remarks, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater emphasis on next-generation technology. It established a dedicated metaverse team this past summer. It recently 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 hire 10,000 more people in Europe to work on the metaverse.
This summer, Zuckerberg said that the metaverse is “going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet.” “And I believe it will be the next big chapter for our company as well, really doubling down in this area.”
Complicating matters, even though Facebook has been heavily promoting the concept of the metaverse in recent weeks, it is still not widely understood. Neal Stephenson, a sci-fi novelist, coined the term to describe a virtual world where people can escape from a dystopian, real world. It’s now being adopted by one of the world’s largest and most contentious corporations, which will have to explain why its own virtual world is worth exploring.
