In the early morning of October 29, Beijing time, Facebook announced on Thursday (October 28) that it would change the company’s name to “Meta”. This logo has now replaced the company’s iconic Like icon on the Menlo Park’s global headquarters card. Zuckerberg on Facebook on Thursday
A speech at the Connect conference said, “The metaverse is the next frontier. From now on, we will put the metaverse first, not Facebook first.”
Facebook hopes to bet the future on the new computing platform “metauniverse”. The name change is the clearest signal. The concept of metauniverse originates from the imagination of science fiction writers. In Facebook’s view, whether talking with colleagues in a conference room or hanging out with friends in remote parts of the world, people will gather and communicate by entering a virtual environment.
Zuckerberg’s open letter:
We are at the beginning of a new chapter on the Internet, which is also a new chapter for our company.
In recent decades, technology has allowed people to connect and express themselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mainly posted text on the website. When we have a cameracell phone, The Internet has become more visible and mobile. As connection speeds increase, video becomes a richer way to share experiences. We go from the desktop to the web to the mobile phone; from the text to the photo to the video, but this is not the end.
The next generation of computing platform will be more immersive, this will be a concrete Internet, you are in the experience, not just watching it. We call it the meta universe, and it will touch every product we create.
The defining quality of the meta-universe will be a sense of presence-like you are with another person or in another place. Really feeling being with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That’s why we focused on building this.
In the metaverse, you can do almost anything you can imagine—partying with friends and family, working, studying, playing, shopping, creating—and completely new experiences that don’t fit the way we think about computers or mobile phones today. . We made a movie to explore how you might use the meta-universe in the future.
In the future, you will be able to transfer to the office instantly like a hologram, without commuting, at a friend’s concert, or in your parents’ living room. No matter where you live, this will open up more opportunities for you. You can spend more time on things that are important to you, reduce traffic time, and reduce your carbon footprint.
Think about how many objects you have today may just be holograms in the future. yourstelevision, You finishedbeautifulWork settings with multiple displays, your board games and more-instead of physical things assembled in a factory, they will be holograms designed by creators around the world.
You will cross these experiences on different devices-augmented reality glasses keep you in the real world, virtual reality keeps you fully immersed, mobile phones and computers allow you to jump into them from existing platforms. This is not to say to spend more time on the screen; it is to make the time we have already spent better.
Meta universe will not be created by a single company. It will be created by creators and developers to create new experiences and digital props that can interoperate and open up a larger creative economy than the current platform and its policies limit.
During this journey, our role is to accelerate the development of basic technologies, social platforms and creative tools, bring the meta-universe to life, and weave these technologies into our social media applications. We believe that Metaverse can provide a better social experience than anything that exists today, and we will work to help realize its potential.
As I wrote in the original founder letter: “We do not create services to make money; we make money to provide better services.”
This method is very useful to us. We have established our business to support very large and long-term investments to build better services, which is what we plan to do here.
The past five years have humiliated me and the company in many ways. One of the main lessons I learned is that just making products that people like is not enough.
I increasingly realize that the story of the Internet is not simple. Each chapter will bring new voices and new ideas, but it will also bring new challenges, risks and damage to established interests. We need to work together to make the future look the best from the beginning.
From day one, privacy and security need to be implanted in the meta universe. The same is true for open standards and interoperability. This not only requires new technical work—such as supporting encryption and non-functional projects in the community—it also requires new forms of governance. Most importantly, we need to help build an ecosystem so that more people will have benefits in the future, not only as consumers but also as creators.
This period of time is also ashamed, because as a large company, we also understand what it’s like to develop games on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my view of the technology industry. I began to believe that the lack of consumer choice and the high cost of developers are stifling innovation and hindering the development of the Internet economy.
We tried a different approach. We want as many people as possible to have access to our services, which means working hard to reduce costs, not to increase costs. Our mobile application is free. Our advertising model is designed to provide merchants with the lowest prices. Our business tools are available at cost or modest expense. Therefore, billions of people like our services, and hundreds of millions of companies rely on our tools.
This is how we want to help build the meta-universe. We plan to sell our equipment at cost prices or subsidies so that more people can use them. We will continue to support side loading and streaming on PCs, giving people more choices instead of forcing them to use Quest Store to find apps or contact users. Our goal is to provide developer and creator services at a low cost in as many cases as possible, so that we can maximize the overall creative economy. We need to make sure that we do not lose too much money in this process.
We hope that in the next ten years, Metaverse will cover one billion people, carry hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and provide employment opportunities for millions of creators and developers.
When we started the next chapter, I thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.
We are a company focused on connecting people. Although most technology companies focus on how people interact with technology, we have always focused on developing technology so that people can interact with each other.
Today, we are considered a social media company. Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. This is an iconic social media brand.
Developing social applications has always been important to us, and there are still many things to develop. But this is not everything we do. In our DNA, we create technology to bring people together. The meta universe is the next frontier that connects people, just like the social network when we first started.
Now our brand is closely connected with a product, it cannot represent everything we do now, let alone the future. Over time, I hope that we will be regarded as a meta-universe company, and I hope to position our work and identity in the direction we are heading.
We have just announced a fundamental reform of the company. We now divide the business into two different parts: one is the application series, and the other is the work of the future platform. Our work on the meta-universe is not just one of these parts. The meta universe includes social experience and future technology. When we expand our horizons, it’s time to adopt a new brand.
To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I am proud to tell you that our current company is Meta.
Our mission has not changed. It is still to unite people together. Our apps and their brands have not changed. We are still a company that designs technology around people.
But all our products, including our apps, now have a new vision: to help realize the life of the meta universe. Now we have a name that reflects the breadth of our work.
From now on, we will give priority to Meta Universe, not Facebook. This means that over time, you will no longer need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brands begin to appear in our products, I hope that people all over the world will begin to understand the Meta brand and the future we represent.
I have studied classical literature before, and the word “meta” comes from Greek, meaning “beyond”. To me, it symbolizes that there is always more to be built, and there is always a next chapter in the story. Our story begins in a dormitory, beyond our imagination; it becomes a series of applications, people use these applications to connect with each other, find their own voice, and create businesses, communities and sports, and change the world.
I am very proud of what we have so far. I am excited about what will happen next. Today we surpass what is possible, beyond the limit of the screen, beyond the limit of distance and physics, and towards the future, so that everyone can exist and create New opportunities and experience new things. This is a future beyond any company, and it will be created by all of us.
We created things that let people come together in new ways. We have learned lessons from difficult social problems and closed platforms. Now is the time to take everything we have learned to help us build the next chapter.
I will devote our energy to this cause-more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you join us. The future will exceed our imagination.
–mark Zuckerberg