Facebook Planning To Change Name? Leaves Social Media in a Tizz!

As per new reports, Facebook is planning on changing its name. As per a report by “The Verge” Facebook may change its name soon, the reason stated is to highlight “building a Metaverse”. The upcoming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes to discuss at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th but could be announced sooner, is designed to signify the internet giant’s aim to be known for more than just social media and all of its associated problems.

The revamped Facebook app would most likely be presented as one of many products handled by a parent company that also manages Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and other businesses. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on this article. Facebook currently has over 10,000 staff working on consumer devices such as augmented reality glasses, which Zuckerberg expects will become as common as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that “we will effectively move from people seeing us as largely a social media company to being a metaverse company” over the next several years. A renaming might also help to further distinguish Zuckerberg’s futuristic work from the tremendous criticism Facebook is presently facing over its current social platform.

The former employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen recently released a stockpile of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the United States and internationally are attempting to break up Facebook, and public trust in the company’s operations is eroding. Facebook isn’t the only well-known technology business to alter its name as its goals grow. Google reorganised altogether under the Alphabet holding company in 2015, partly to show that it was no longer just a search engine, but a global conglomerate with subsidiaries developing self-driving cars and health-care technology.

In 2016, Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc., the same year it began referring to itself as a “camera company” and unveiled its first set of Spectacles camera spectacles.

The new Facebook corporate name, I’m told, is a highly guarded secret within the firm’s gates and isn’t widely known, even within the company’s whole top leadership. Horizon, the name of the company’s still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that has been in development for several years, maybe a contender. Shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration dubbed Horizon Workrooms, the app’s name was changed to Horizon Worlds.

Apart from Zuckerberg’s remarks, Facebook has been quietly laying the basis for a bigger focus on future technology. This past summer, it formed a specialised metaverse team. Andrew Bosworth, the company’s head of AR and VR, has recently been promoted to chief technology officer. Facebook just announced plans to hire 10,000 more individuals in Europe to work on the metaverse a few days ago.

The metaverse is “going to be a significant focus,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton this summer. “I think that this is really going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet.” “I also believe it will be the next great chapter for our firm since we will be tripling down in this area.” Complicating matters, even though Facebook has been extensively advertising the concept of the metaverse in recent weeks, it is still a little-understood concept. The term was coined by science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual environment where people might escape from a bleak real world. It’s now being adopted by one of the world’s most powerful and polarising organisations, which will have to prove why its own virtual world is worthwhile to explore.