The Facebook app used by almost 3 billion people around the
world every month will keep its name. But speaking at the company's Connect
virtual reality conference, Zuckerberg said it's time to overhaul the
corporation's identity to reflect its broader ambitions.
"It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to
encompass everything that we do," he said. "From now on, we're going
to be metaverse first, not Facebook first."
Seventeen years after Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his
Harvard University dorm room, the company's brand has been badly dented by a
succession of crises, from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential
election to the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, which became public
in 2018, to last month's damaging revelations from former Facebook employee
turned whistleblower Frances Haugen.
But even as the company has been pummeled by a wave of
critical news coverage about its platforms' harms, based on Haugen's trove of
internal documents, Zuckerberg has unapologetically kept his focus on the
metaverse, describing it on Thursday as the company's new "North
Star."
He says the metaverse is the next big computing platform to
which people's attention — and dollars — will shift in the coming years. And he
wants the newly christened Meta to play a prime role in creating it and turning
it into big business.
"Building our social media apps will always be an
important focus for us. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one
product that it can't possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let
alone in the future," Zuckerberg said.
What is the metaverse anyway?
Zuckerberg announced the new name, Meta, in a glitzy video
presentation that served as an explainer about the metaverse, a futuristic and
vaguely defined concept that has become a Silicon Valley buzzword in recent
years.
The term "metaverse" was coined by science fiction
writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash. Enthusiasts use it to
refer to immersive virtual spaces where people can play games, attend concerts,
meet with colleagues and buy all kinds of digital goods and services.
Facebook demonstrated many of those experiences in
Thursday's slickly produced video, showing Zuckerberg riding a virtual reality
electric hydrofoil (in a nod to his real-life hobby), fencing with a hologram
and walking through a 3D rendering of his "home space."
This week, Facebook told investors its spending on virtual
reality and other next-generation products and services will take a $10 billion
bite out of its overall operating profit this year. It also announced plans to
hire 10,000 workers in Europe over the next five years to build the metaverse.
On Thursday, Zuckerberg said he expects to invest "many
billions of dollars for years to come," painting a vision of the future
where a billion people will use the metaverse and it will generate hundreds of
billions of dollars in digital commerce — while acknowledging it remains
"a long way off."
"We are fully committed to this," Zuckerberg said.
"It is the next chapter of our work and, we believe, for the internet
overall."
In a nod to Facebook's long run of crises, Zuckerberg
devoted part of the presentation to emphasizing that the company will center
privacy and safety as it builds its new virtual services and hardware.
"Privacy standards will be built into the metaverse
from Day 1," he said. "One of the lessons I've internalized from the
last five years is we need to emphasize these principles from the start."
The change could be key to the company's existence
Staying on top of the next big thing in tech is about more
than just Zuckerberg's interest in Silicon Valley's latest fad. It's about his
company's continued existence, which depends on attracting younger users.
The leaked internal documents show Facebook is worried about
losing relevance as its user base grows older. People under 30 are spending
less time on Facebook, posting less and sending fewer messages, according to an
internal report prepared in March and reported on by Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, Instagram, which the company views as a pipeline
for younger users who will eventually age into its other apps, is losing
teenagers to other social media platforms — a phenomenon the company identified
as an "existential threat,"