Adam Kos Last week, news spread around the world that the social network Facebook is awaiting a renaming. Officially, this step will probably be announced by the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg himself as part of the annual Connect conference, which takes place on October 28. Although this seems like a big deal, it is quite common and has not escaped the likes of Google.
It was completely reorganized in 2015 under a holding company called Alphabet. In part, this was to show that it was no longer just a web search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health technology, as well as mobile phones and the operating system for them. Snapchat then changed its name to Snap Inc. in 2016. It was the same year that he introduced his first hardware to the world, the Spectacles "photographic" glasses.
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Company ambitions
There is a clear friction between the label Facebook as a social network and Facebook as a company. The renaming of the network will thus separate these two worlds, when the new designation of the network will be associated only with it, while the company Facebook will still own not only it, but also Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, i.e. a brand that also produces hardware in the form of AR glasses.
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Department of problems
In contrast to Facebook's recent service outages, the renaming will also have an effect on when things go wrong for the company. The company is responsible for the error when the platforms were unavailable, not the network itself. However, the situation may seem to all the uninitiated as if the problems were caused by the social network itself. She would thus be responsible only for herself, i.e. her successes and possible failures.
The world of the internet
Facebook already has over 10 employees, who the world still associates with the social network. But that is not true in the case of those behind Oculus. Zuckerberg has already said yes The Verge, that he wants Facebook not to be considered a social media company, but a so-called metaverse company. The CEO of the company imagines this in such a way that people will use different devices (Oculus glasses) to interact with the virtual environment (that is, the newly named networks as well as those owned by other companies and, of course, those newly arrived).
Jokes on the topic of broken Facebook services
Additionally, Zuckerberg believes in Oculus because he anticipates that the technology will eventually become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today. And then there are the Ray-Ban Stories glasses, somewhat of another Facebook hardware effort. If you're wondering what the metaverse is, the term was originally coined by science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world into which people escape from a dystopian, real world. Have you seen the movie Ready Player One? If so, then you have a clear picture.
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US government
Facebook as a company is also facing increasing scrutiny from the US government, which does not like various of its practices. In the case of renaming, it would again be a wise choice. However, the question is why to rename the network, as such, and not rather the company. Of course, we don't see into the background, just like many top managers of the company, because the information about the renaming is kept very much under wraps and they don't want to go public with it yet, as mentioned by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who testified against Facebook before Congress as part of antitrust cases.
And what could the new name be? There is speculation about some connection with the Horizon label, which is supposed to be an as-yet-unreleased version of the VR application used to integrate Facebook services into the Roblox platform. It was just recently renamed Horizon World, shortly after Facebook showed cooperative functions for working together on one project under the name Horizon Workrooms.
But I have a feeling that the renaming will take place within the company, and not the network. That's just an aside.
Exactly as Stehno writes, only the parent company should change its name, not the social network, as this article claims. So the average user won't even feel it. Good quality article... :)