What is the new name of the American giant “Meta”?

Facebook. We finally know his name! On Thursday, October 28, Facebook planned to announce a new name for its company, reflecting the group’s desire to return to metawares. You can now call it “meta”. Why this new name?

[Mis à jour le 29 octobre 2021, à 12h40] Forget Facebook, this is meta. During its annual “Facebook Connect” conference on Thursday, October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg’s company plans to announce the name of its new group, which, in addition to the popular social networking site Facebook, will include other applications such as WhatsApp for messaging. Instagram for sharing photos and videos. 17 years after its inception, the US-based California-based Internet company has a new name. Why meta? According to the founder, the word, which means “beyond” in Greek, echoes his desire to return to “metawares”.

Laurent Chloe, President and CEO of Facebook France, responded to the microphone this morningEurope 1 To the announcement of Mark Zuckerberg. According to him, metawares will “change the world”, and it is necessary to look at it, because this development creates a real “technological revolution”. Believing that Metawares is “the new chapter of the Internet, the future of technology”, Laurent Chloe stressed the “luck” that this opportunity represents for Europe, because, according to him, “behind the virtual gaps we speak of, these are tomorrow’s jobs.”

What are Metavers?

Do you still not understand? According to Business Insider, Metawares “refers to shared virtual space that people can access via the Internet using virtual reality and augmented reality devices”. “Metawares is the heir of the mobile Internet. This deep feeling cannot be expressed by the screen. […] Currently, our brand is so closely tied to a product that it cannot compile everything we do today, let alone the future. I hope that over time, we will be seen as a metawares company, ”Zuckerberg explained.

In the virtual world of metawares accessible through virtual reality headsets or augmented reality glasses, the user can create his or her avatar in the three-dimensional universe where his friends, family, and office mates are. This place can be fun and work. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Metawares will be an option: the user can “immediately teleport in hologram form to move around the office and to a concert or reception with friends.” [ses] Parents said, “It creates more opportunities wherever you live.” You can allocate more time to important people, reduce traffic time and reduce your carbon footprint. “For this, Facebook plans to hire 10,000 people in Europe, with $ 10 billion in the project.

Facebook: New name for social network?

The conference was an opportunity for Facebook’s CEO to unveil the group’s new logo, which is reminiscent of an infinite iconic blue. Nearly three billion users of the network will be guaranteed: this new name will only apply to the group, the social network, which will have the name “Facebook”. In addition, the structure of the parent company’s applications (especially Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) will remain the same: in short, only the structure of the “meta” will change.

Launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues at Harvard University in 2004, access to the social network was initially restricted to university students, extending to several American institutions of higher learning (especially Columbia, Yale and Stanford). League universities and across the country. It will become accessible to everyone in 2006. The name of the site comes from the English name trombinoscopes, which collect photos of all students’ faces (“facebooks”) at the beginning of the university year.

A recent crisis on Facebook

Did the recent crisis that rocked the Facebook group have an impact on the company’s choice to change its name? In fact, due to a major darkening in the beginning, the American team was recently weakened by the revelations of a whistleblower. Frances Hougen, a 37-year-old engineer who worked for two years as an expert in algorithms in a division dedicated to the American company “Civic Integrity”, was blocked by the group’s methods and resigned last May. With her, the engineer took several tens of thousands of compromise documents, which he leaked to the American press. The “Facebook Files” scandal was born. Through these documents, the company seems to be fully aware of its negative impact on the community: its willingness to prioritize its profits over the mental health of those who use the social network is becoming apparent. In addition, the Facebook files revealed that the engineers who developed the algorithms used by the team could not predict how these mechanisms would develop and work.

But Mark Zuckerberg ignored the matter and approached it only in a concise way: “The last years have taught me many lessons of humility”, he simply affirmed.