Realignment of the network giant
Why Facebook allegedly no longer wants to be called Facebook
Facebook boss and company founder Mark Zuckerberg
© Blondet Eliot / ABACA // Picture Alliance
Facebook badly needs positive headlines. Now a name change is supposed to help to realign the image of the scratched network giant.
The Facebook brand is one of the ten most valuable in the world. In the current “Brandz” ranking by Kantar, the Internet company is in 6th place with a brand value of almost 227 billion dollars, and Facebook is in 10th place among market observers from Interbrand. However, the brand has suffered a lot in recent months. Perhaps so much that company founder Mark Zuckerberg will take a radical step in the coming week to convey the far-reaching ambitions of the group more clearly to the outside world.
In any case, the technology portal “The Verge”, which is well networked in Silicon Valley, reported on Wednesday that the Facebook group wanted to change its company name. In order to put the focus on the virtual world “Metaverse”, Zuckerberg will announce the name change at the conference “Facebook Connect 2021” in the coming week. The change should signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than just social media.
There is no confirmation for the scoop of “The Verge”. “We’re not commenting on that,” said a Facebook spokesman for the German press agency. A denial sounds different. Even within the top management, only a small group was inaugurated, writes “The Verge”. It is all the more astonishing, however, that someone from this narrow circle spoiled the show for CEO Zuckerberg in the coming week.
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The Facebook group not only owns the actual Facebook service, which has a blue and white logo as a smartphone app, but also the messenger service WhatsApp and the photo and video service Instagram. Oculus is also part of the Facebook empire. The division manufactures virtual reality glasses, including the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest lines. So far, these different brands have been overshadowed by Facebook. Only Instagram appears independently in the “Brandz” list of Kantar at number 18. The market value is still just under 83 billion.
According to The Verge report, renaming the group would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company that oversees Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and other areas.
A hot candidate for the new name is “Meta”. The internet domain meta.com is currently redirecting to the meta.org website. This is the homepage of a biomedical research project that was developed under the direction of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. These were founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
The “Metaverse” and Facebook’s image scratched
Facebook would not be the first Silicon Valley corporation to change its company name if the direction of the company expanded. For example, after the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, Apple deleted the word “computer” from the company name. At the time, the iPod music player alone was making more sales than the Macintosh computers.
Google reorganized itself in 2015 under the umbrella of a holding company called Alphabet. The Internet company wanted to signal that it not only operates a search engine and a cloud business, but also has ambitions for driverless cars, health solutions and other high-tech areas. And Snapchat renamed itself Snap Inc. in 2016. At the same time, the company began to call itself the “camera company”.
By changing the name of the group, Facebook would underline its ambitions that go beyond conventional social networks. Months ago, for example, Zuckerberg announced the creation of a “Metaverse”. This is supposed to be a virtual environment as described in science fiction novels.
Zuckerberg believes that this is no longer just a dream due to the rapid development of hardware and glasses for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). On Monday, the company announced that it would create 10,000 new, highly qualified jobs in the European Union over the next five years in order to build the virtual world “Metaverse”.
A motive for the renaming could also be the wish, the scratched image of Facebook to improve. Whistleblower Frances Haugen, for example, accuses the company of having brushed aside concerns raised internally, according to which Instagram worsens the problems of every third young girl with their own body image and even triggers suicidal thoughts in some young people. The allegations of the former Facebook manager Haugen reinforce Facebook critics in the US Congress, who are campaigning for the group to be broken up.
Facebook, meanwhile, is preparing for a second burst of publicity following the first wave of releases based on the internal papers owned by Haugen. In the past six weeks you have seen how documents can be incorrectly characterized, wrote the Facebook press office on Twitter. “Obviously, not every employee at Facebook is an executive; not every opinion is the company’s position.”