Like Google a few years ago, now Alphabet, Facebook is changing its name so that its upcoming products, such as a connected watch and the metaverse, do not suffer from the image of… Facebook
At the very end of his virtual conference, on October 28, Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, announced the name of Meta. This will be the name of the structure that will cover all the activities of the firm, whether social networks — such as Facebook or Instagram –, WhatsApp or connected glasses and the Oculus Quest 2.
A strategy reminiscent of the one carried out by Google in 2015 with Alphabet to group all its activities under this banner, even if, in the end, the group is still essentially referred to by the name of its search engine. Meta is also a reminder of the concept of metaverse, i.e. the transposition of the real universe into the virtual one, which Facebook has been investing a lot in recent months.
The social network is planning to recruit 10,000 people in Europe for this concept and to spend 10 billion dollars to start with. But erasing the name of Facebook for Meta and talking about the future comes at the right time when the firm is in the wake of the torments caused by the revelations of the whistleblower Frances Haugen, the famous Facebook Files.
A new brand to forget the present
Since the publication of these compromising internal documents and the hearing of this ex-employee in front of the American Congress, the reputation of the social networking giant is quite tarnished. The effects are strongly felt at the level of the stock market where its price has plummeted. It is therefore by draping himself in this new veil of Meta that Mark Zuckerberg seeks to forget these incidents.
By betting on the metaverse, Facebook is also projecting itself into the future and intends to be the main actor of this virtual universe. And on the present side, the company is also starting to multiply its connected accessories. In addition to its pair of glasses made in collaboration with Ray-Ban, a new connected watch stamped Meta should be released next summer.
And precisely, an image of it has just been unearthed by a developer who has dissected the application related to Ray-Ban Stories. On the photo published by Bloomberg, we can see a watch with the same design as the Apple Watch, but with a small camera to take photos and videos directly.
