Enlarge image
Facebook logo: the blue should stay
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
If this news turns out to be true, "The Verge" Facebook has just ruined the surprise of the year: According to a report by the online magazine, the company is planning to change its company name - a decision that the world will only find out about on October 28th should.
On this day, the “Facebook Connect 2021” conference begins with a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg.
Actually, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are the topics of the event.
But this time Zuckerberg wants to announce the new name of the company there, they say.
How it should read is still completely unclear.
Even within the top management, only a small group was inaugurated, writes "The Verge".
It is all the more astonishing that an anonymous tipster passed the information on name change to the author of the text.
more on the subject
Destruction as a last resort: Now they want to see Facebook on the slaughterhouse by Patrick Beuth, Janne Knödler, Thomas Schulz and Ines Zöttl
Some already suspect that it could be a smoke candle with which the company is trying to distract from other problems.
For example, from the allegations of the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who a few days ago called for strict regulation of the online giant in front of the US Congress.
In addition, the group seems to fear further revelations.
He wrote on Twitter on Monday that more than 30 journalists were working on a "coordinated series of articles based on thousands of leaked documents."
It's about the metaverse
With the renaming, Facebook supposedly wants to make it clear that it is more than the social network of the same name that made the company big.
The new name should only apply to the parent company, in which subsidiaries such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus and others are gathered.
The various branches of the group, however, should keep their established names.
The process is reminiscent of Google's renaming of its parent company to Alphabet.
With its move, the Internet company also wanted to make it clear that its business goes far beyond the search engine, whose name it was previously called.
The step could also be important for Facebook to underline Mark Zuckerberg's plan to establish a so-called metaverse as the new generation of the Internet.
The importance of this project for the company can be seen from the fact that Facebook wants to create 10,000 new jobs for the development of this virtual world in Europe alone.
Humble beginnings
Under the term Metaverse Facebook understands a world in which physical reality merges with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in a cyber world.
The term comes from the American writer Neal Stephenson, who first used it in 1992 in his science fiction novel "Snow Crash".
The company gave a first, still very modest outlook on how something like this could be imagined in August.
In the VR app »Workroom«, colleagues can meet in the form of avatars in a virtual conference room and access their computers at the same time.
The comic-like graphics are currently more reminiscent of the virtual online world »Second Life«, which was popular at the beginning of the millennium, and not of futuristic future projects.
Another of the company's larger VR project was long called “Facebook Horizon”.
It was recently renamed "Horizon Worlds".
Facebook itself has not yet commented on the report about its alleged renaming.
mak
