Breaking: Facebook's company name is now "Meta"

At the Connect 2021 event, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that it'll rebrand its company name to "Meta".

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing "Meta", image from The Verge

Facebook is now Meta

The logo of Meta

Zuckerberg said that they created Meta to bring all its apps and technologies under one new company brand and its focus will be to bring "metaverse" to life and help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.

The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today's online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together—and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world. It's the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.

Zuckerberg also notes that building apps will always be important to them, but it is not all they do.

As a quick recap, Meta also owns the likes of Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and around 90 more companies apart from Facebook. Currently, its brand is tightly linked to one product and it can't represent everything that the company is doing today.

Due to this move, the company's CEO said that they will now be "metaverse-first, not Facebook first". This means that over time, its users won't need a Facebook account to use its other services.

To make it clear, Facebook, Inc. (the company itself) will be the one to rebrand as "Meta". Facebook as an app and service will likely remain as "Facebook".

The move reminds us of what Google did when it introduced Alphabet to be its parent holding company.

Sources: Facebook 1, 2