Facebook, the parent company of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus is reportedly planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
Google in 2015 did same by creating a parent company called Alphabet which then in turn owns Google and all of its subsidiaries. The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail.
The rebrand would likely position the Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.
Facebook is facing intense scrutiny for the way it handles its user’s data and a host of scandals. A rebrand could separate the futuristic work Mark Zuckerberg is focused on from all the bad publicity it has been getting recently.
A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.
This new company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership. This past summer it set up a dedicated metaverse team.
The Metaverse
According to Zuckerberg, “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.
Complicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks, it’s still not a concept that’s widely understood. The term was coined originally by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world. Now it’s being adopted by one of the world’s largest and most controversial companies — and it’ll have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.
2 replies on “Facebook Plans to Rebrand the Company with a new Name”
One wouldn’t imagine that a company as big as Facebook would need rebranding but here we are. The focus is to grow and keep evolving.
Im sure they want to dodge the bad name and publicity they have previously earned