30
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Facebook changes name to Meta: Mark Zuckerberg announces company rebrand as it moves to the metaverse
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- Title
- The Facebook Company Is Now Meta | Meta
- Published
- Oct 28 2021
- Word count
- 406 words
Ugh. I just .... ugh.
EDIT : I'm already annoyed with the ways this is going to mess up conversations. I've already had to nix "trump" (as in, "i play my trump card" in Euchre) just for my own sanity. "Meta" is already a word used in gaming and a suffix that's tacked onto words to indicate self-referencing or self-examination. Now every time it gets used in a conversation it's going to provide natural topic diversion point to talk about Facebook et al. Bleh.
What do you refer to the series of 26 letters that make up words?
The world's largest tropical rainforest?
The edible fruit produced by malus domestica?
Crossing a stream at a shallow place?
The list goes on and on. You'll be fine.
The list going on and on is actually a very poignant pet peeve of mine.
Remember when people still used the word "über" in normal conversation, like they might use the word "super?"
And just to drive the point home - when I googled "umlaut" to make sure I spelled it right in this comment, the top result was for some company that had appropriated that word too.
Honestly I hate it. Companies that do this are eroding our language much faster than generational slang ever could.
Except the companies don't last forever and the words become/return to part of society without any connection to the company.
Do you think of the companies behind the word when you hear onesie, zipper, windbreaker, jet ski, escalator, hula hoop, ping pong, dumpster, yo-yo, zip code, popsicle, granola, frisbee, rollerblades, super glue, bubble wrap, trampoline, laundromat, dry ice, fiberglass, realtor, seeing eye dog, sheetrock, styrofoam, videotape, or polo?
Probably not, but all of them were originally names/trademarks of various companies.
You have a point, but I think maybe an important distinction is that all those companies you listed created a new word, which later became common vernacular.
That seems like an entirely separate (maybe even opposite) phenomenon from the companies that take an existing word out of the common vernacular to use as their name, which word ends up removed from the common vernacular afterword.
Google itself is a good example, since you can't bring up the number (googol) that the company named itself after anymore without the listener being confused by the much more well-recognized company name.
But I think Uber is an even better example, since the prior word was actually well-used before, unlike googol.
Which just circles back to my original comment about letters, forests, fruit, and crossing streams and how it doesn't actually take anything from language as it's all about context and people understand that. If you say the word office no one will immediately think of software or a television show, their thought will be of the context in which it is provided. If you say "I'm going to the office" no one will think you're entering software or headed to the set of a television show.
The use of uber in conversation with others will vary from group to group, I'm doubting either of us have data to back up amount casual use and potential decline of such. And when it comes down to it uber and super are just replacements for very, which is a bane on vocabulary as it is. Nearly anywhere the adverb very (and it's replacements) can be used, there is another word that is more appropriate.
Off topic, but has Amazon the company ever made any contribution to the preservation of Amazon the rainforest? I know it's just a name, but it'd be kind of a no-brainer in my view, and very good marketing.
I feel like they'd sooner buy the entire rainforest than use their wealth for good, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
I can't seem to track down the articles, but some years ago there was some pushback from some indigenous people against them using the name Amazon. It never got anywhere because at that stage Amazon was still seen as largely good thing. Be interesting to see how a campaign run today would fare.
They still are. Their favorability rating went down 2 points over 2020 - but that was still from 91% favorable to 89% favorable. Compared to 58% for Twitter, or 66% for Facebook.
70% of people think that Amazon have a positive impact on society - 23% are neutral, and only 7% are negative.
74% of people trust Amazon with their data - it actually went up 1 point year over year!
For the average person, Amazon is that cool website where you can buy a bunch of things and they ship it to you really quickly. Oh, and they also make neat gadgets for cheap (kindle, echo, etc.). End of story, pretty much - it's very much still a harmless brand in the public eye.
Took me a while, and a Google search, to understand the last one was Ford.
Not part of the Oregon Trail generation I reckon?
Is that where it's from? Yeah, no where close to growing up with Oregon Trail, unfortunately!
Well it's a real word. For example, Oxford is named that because that town sprung up near a shallow part of the Thames where cattle drovers would bring their oxen to, well, ford it. But most of the reason we know what it means today is because it was a critical decision that could make or break many an Oregon Trail run.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990
https://archive.org/details/oregon-trail-deluxe
Oh cool, I knew it was more recent than the initial 1971 release when I searched it up.
That was my first thought, but I was second guessing for a while since all the other ones are tech companies.
I'm not so sure. People don't think of Alphabet when they use Google, so I don't see why it would be any different here. Unless they put the Meta brand on all their services, some people might just never hear of it until another scandal arises. Facebook will continue to be Facebook for the majority of its users.
The new Meta is trash and needs to be nerfed into the ground.
I didn't want to be the one to make the obvious joke, so I tip my hat to you for providing the service!
I never metadata I didn't like...
I feel like John Gruber nailed this one:
The brand name Facebook is beyond useless and is a negative asset to the company at this point. There's nothing good associated with the name, only scandal after scandal. It doesn't conjure up warm feelings of communicating with friends (if it ever did).
But let's try and remember that just because they change their name, they'll still be up to the same old dirty tricks.
Am I missing something? People seem to be flipping out about what is essentially a copy of the move Google did a few years ago: They renamed the parent entity to better reflect a diverse amount of subsidiaries. The people who aren't going to care what happens with their data likely didn't care about what Facebook was doing with it in the first place, so they'll have the same amount of qualms with Meta doing the same thing. Otherwise, anybody who really cares about it already knows about what is essentially Facebook's Alphabet move, and it just takes two seconds explain it.
This isn't to defend them, I but I don't see anything to defend or even attack. It likely won't make it easier or harder for them to make any big moves as "Meta" that don't tie to its history as Facebook, in much the same way we don't really talk about how "Alphabet did <thing>" without either clarifying that it's Google's parent company, or referring to it as Google still.
For me personally, the name change is mostly just a stupid corporate thing I can point at and make fun of, because it's ridiculous.
The more salient problem is that a global social media company with a sketchy track record (at best) of being a positive force in the world, has decided they want to go all-in on creating the next big thing that we're all going to use to do (according to them) everything. Even if I buy into the concept that the Metaverse will become a huge factor in how any of us conduct our daily lives, I sure as hell don't think Facebook should be the one leading the charge into that brave new world.
I don't know how much of this inanity is led by Zuck himself versus him and a cabal of his associates on the board. Either way, just seeing how Facebook leaderships seems to imagine the world works, it's like they have some sort of moral or ideological belief in 'connecting people' at the expense of all else and a general notion that privacy and anonymity are silly things that the human race is better off without.
That they have clearly not thought through this philosophy is obvious enough. But what's striking is the apparent monomania around it. It almost seems pathological, like they think they're on a mission from God to realize some kind of new future world for how humans should interact with each other.
Calling it religious would be a bit much because religions tend to actually try to flesh out and live by their theology instead of holding themselves above it and trying to impose it through weird conspiracies. Instead what it makes me think of are these early modern social reformers behind things like the Graham Diet (eat bland foods with no spices to stop masturbating because reasons) or hardcore eugenicists, like H.P. Lovecraft (whose revulsion at the idea of race mixing, or even having other races at all, went beyond ideology to sheer pathology).
We read about these people today and think "Oh man these people were insane." But I guess the modern era is not so different. Perhaps this sort of monomaniacal personality type is just something that shows up in human societies any time there is a major social upheaval. And, for some reason, lots of people are willing to give them the resources to try their crazy theories in spite of the body count (and various traumas) they inflict on people in the process. It is, perhaps, worth being suspicious of anyone who wants to unilaterally "reinvent" fundamental elements of the human experience. It's one thing to just create something you think is great and put it out there for others to use or riff on. It's quite something else to decide you've cracked the code on what it means to be "good" and you can you must now impose it on everyone else by hook or by crook.
(On topic with another thread, this is the central theme of Dune so maybe this is a good time to have adapted that book).
Zuck is the king of Facebook. The buck stops at him - the rest of the board is basically King Louis 14th's court - its not like they don't have influence, but only insomuch as that Zuck will listen to them.
He is still has majority voting power, is the chairman, and also the ceo.
That’s true formally, but there are other ways to think about corporate governance.
You could also say that since a CEO normally doesn’t do anything themselves, their influence comes from hiring people who will listen to them. There seem to be a lot of Facebook employees who haven’t been listening very well, lately? In particular, one cultural value that all companies try to get their employees to follow is not leaking company secrets. It’s not working very well. They may be paid well and may have signed confidentiality agreements, but they don’t seem to stay bought?
I guess that’s sort of a “deep state” theory. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it. He can still fire people. (Hiring may be harder.)
@skybrian This article about a recent WaPo interview with Zuck suggests that @stu2b50 ain't exaggerating much.
I think you meant to link to something? I found a 2019 interview but I'm not sure that's the one.
Ooops. Yeah I meant to link to this one: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-revealing-look-at-zuckerberg
Which on the face of it (connecting people) is a great idea. More open communication, transparency, public accountability; these are all great ideas. However implementation matters, perhaps even more than the actual idea.
The kinds of forces that an entity like Facebook deals with are country and continent-sized. They have the ability to affect the lives of billions of people. And there was no vetting process, no checks or balances, or other safeguards put in place because Facebook in it's current form wasn't created deliberately, it evolved. Evolution doesn't produce the best solutions, it produces the ones that are the most effective at surviving. Which is scary to me.
This seems like the most over the top thing someone could write about a company that makes a MySpace alternative and a sterile VRChat clone. Sure, they're really big and seemingly not responsibly operating at their size, but it's over the top to connect every facet of it to insanity. If a random company released a near identical video announcing their multiplayer VR thing, some people would say it looked cool, some people would say it looks like a flop, and no one would describe the trailer as that they're insane people trying to force a religion on others.
I mean the post is a bit over the top but you are talking about a company that has a reach on billions of people.
Facebook is used by billions of people.
WhatsApp is used by billions of people.
Instagram by hundreds of millions of people.
These don't all overlap.
Never in history has there been a company ... Nay, an ENTITY, with as much reach as Facebook. You do not get to describe it as just some random bunch of people making sterile clones of stuff you don't use.
East india company was close.
There were less people on earth back then than people on WhatsApp today.
Had a bit of a mind-bending moment there, so I went to fact check this. East India Company was founded in 1600 and officially went defunct in 1874 according to Wikipedia. Population of the world in 1850 was approximately 1.3 billion. WhatsApp currently has approximately 2 billion users.
We could probably have a small semantic debate about if it's more useful to compare raw numbers or instead measure influence as a percentage of total world/country population, but your point stands.
Few things fill me with existential dread quite like comparing the world population of other moments in history with the figure as it stands today. Not a big fan of imposing limits on offspring, or sterilization or other sorts of eugenics, so I'm not proposing any solutions... I just find the hockey-stick growth of humanity alarming when you look at the numbers. Doesn't seem sustainable, and nobody's really talking much about it.
People talk about it constantly. It turns out what actually happens is that once families are freed from precarity and women are given access to family planning resources birth rates drop below replacement all on their own. This trend holds across a variety of societies with dramatically variant norms about sex, marriage, women's place in society, etc.
This is literally how Facebook execs talk about themselves, it's not just me
It's also far beyond a MySpace clone.. Like it or not, it's a critical part of the social and political fabric of many countries. And it's not like the inventor of breakfast cereals looked any less like a pointless frivolity in his time either.
I think some figures from the 2020 Vox tech company survey better put this into context.
Percentage of people who know that Instagram is owned by Facebook: 38%
Percentage of people who know that Whatsapp is owned by Facebook: 29%
This will do an excellent job at separating Facebook, and any baggage it has (from the same survey: Facebook has a comparatively low 71% approval rate, compared to say, Amazon's 91%, and the worst score in "do you trust this company with your personal information" at 41%, as compared to Amazon's 73% - still higher than literally any politician, though) from its other properties.
Not that it has that much work to do! People are already hard pressed to realize the connection or care enough to remember it.
Weird implied "metaverse" aspirations aside, I think from Facebook's point of view the renaming of the parent company makes a lot of sense - if nothing else, Facebook now does a lot more than Facebook the website, which is retaining its name - some people seem confused over that.
The real point of this is to separate Facebook, one single social media product, and the company that also runs the most used communication platform in the world and the second largest social media product (but "cool" and hip with the kids) as well as the most successful commercial VR headset.
Other news (not sure if it’s worth it’s own thread):
No more Facebook account requirement for oculus quest soon
And GTA:San Andreas was announced for the quest
It's just going to be a 'Meta' account now. Look, the rebrand is working! I jest, but...
In the end, they don't need you to have an account. They just need the UUID (of the device they made) and a way to tie it to you.
Your employer will be happy to get your Meta headset for improved productivity, and they totally won't use
spywareanalytics to insure that you are more productive.Yeah this is it right here. They already have a record on you whether you’ve registered a Facebook account or not. A Facebook account might fill out a lot more of the dossier, but they don’t need it to start populating whatever data they need to.
Probably a worse rebrand than when Wikia rebranded itself to Fandom in order to shed its previous poor rep.
Of course the irony now is that Gamepedia, the Curse-owned service that a lot of game communities migrated to because Wikia plastered ads all over everything, has now been merged with Fandom.
I don’t think Google really rebranded anything, they just changed the name of the holding company. But they still use Google for all things Internet, they don’t use the Alphabet name in consumer facing products.
I suspect Facebook wants a brand that can encompass IG, WhatsApp and Oculus, all three of which feel very distinct, without it having the creep factor of “ew I’m on Facebook”.
Also, Zuck is so full of himself. It doesn’t matter.
Nicely put.
While Facebook will still be the name for the blue-colored social media app, Meta will be the umbrella company that also includes Instagram and WhatsApp.
That’s more an internal structure thing. For example, Deepmind and Waymo are “Other Bets” companies that aren’t part of Google. They do their own hiring, have different employee policies, and so on.
You no longer see Google announce earnings. It's Alphabet that announces earnings.
Can you imagine? "Stock futures drop as Meta shares fall after earnings."
Also, does FAANG become MAANG?
Edit: MAANA is kinda nice.
We can fit Microsoft in the acronym now, MMAAAN, or MAAAMN for biblical fans.
MANAMA? Kinda reminiscent of mahna mahna
Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, Netflix
If we're willing to count Meta twice I think it works.
Though, oddly, Google didn't change their stock symbol and Facebook did.
Google's gimmick was having two stock symbols. GOOG still trades slightly bit higher than GOOGL for some reason. I don't remember why they did that versus a stock split. Mostly it just complicated my finances.
The founders wanted to sell the stock without diluting their voting rights, so they split each share into a share with voting rights and a share without voting rights, then they could sell half their stock without selling their voting rights.
Oh, that's right. Thanks!
This currently looks like a company rebrand.
Facebook.com is currently the same.
If you navigate to meta.com, it automatically redirects you to about.facebook.com/meta.
The stock market is shrugging this off.
Curiously, when I logged onto facebook, it asked me to complete a short survey. It was anything but short, and kept asking the same question, effectively about how much I dislike facebook.
Their surveys have never been good, ever
Apparently “meta” sounds like the word for “dead” in Hebrew, and there are some funny memes going around about that.
(Hopefully I’m not posting on this thread too late; I don’t mean to necrobump.)
I mean, every language has its quirks, you can't find something that works in all of them.
Facebook sounds like "Ass-goat" in French. Maybe meta is an improvement.