Tech Space

Everyone’s favorite platform to share thoughts, opinions and photos of your kids holding pumpkins has been around for a minute, it’s fair to say.

Facebook originally launched in 2004 and opened up to anyone over the age of 13 with an email address in 2006.

They recently made news, however, for what’s perhaps our generation’s most controversial rebranding efforts.

Facebook is dead, long live Facebook! Or as they’d now like to be addressed: Meta.

It’s important to note that corporate rearranging like this isn’t completely unheard of when we talk about massive technology conglomerates.

Back in 2015, Google facilitated a corporate restructure to operate under the parent company of Alphabet.

The veritable Google still exists as anyone sensible’s search engine of choice, but it’s simply now a product offered by their parent company rather than being an entity in and of itself.

Corporate structure’s a fun topic, but they ask me to write about technology, so perhaps we’ll tackle that some other time.

Meta then, will be the parent company to all of the other products and services which they have collected over the course of the years, as well as Facebook as we currently know it.

This includes Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and as it stands today 88 other brands which will remain operating in their own space under the new Meta umbrella.

The word meta, it’s worth mentioning, is of Greek origin and means “beyond” or “more-than.”

A rather fitting handle for a company with such a vast portfolio and a valuation hovering around the one trillion dollar mark. With that much at stake, why the risky move then away from what’s become a household name?

Facebook as a social networking platform has suffered much criticism over its lifetime, but these have become more damaging of late with allegations of their leadership putting profits before the safety and wellbeing of its users.

This coupled with a few high profile news stories about their acceptable content policy has left a lot of the public with a bad taste toward the platform.

It isn’t too much of a leap to see that a name change might help create distance between the mistakes of the past and how they’d like to be seen moving forward.

A rose by any other name, right?

There’s another compelling reason for the change though, and this one doesn’t need nearly as much speculation. The idea of how the internet itself looks in the future is popularly touted as being more like a virtual reality experience, with webpages and videos being replaced by lifelike 3D worlds and avatars.

This slightly Matrix-esque vision is known as “the metaverse.” By rebranding from Facebook to Meta, they’re able to get out in front of this trend which undoubtedly will mean further revenue streams and opportunities to innovate.

It’s the Jacuzzi versus generic-brand hot tub trick all over again. BIC versus unbranded ballpoints. There’s value in being synonymous.

The plan isn’t without its risks though. Barely a month has passed since what was then Facebook’s entire suite of apps was down for multiple hours on a global scale. That was a high profile event; if Meta’s plan for the future is to create a platform on which we build the evolution of the internet, such a downtime would be far more damaging.

As the announcements were released regarding this name change, something in the forefront of my mind was a certain Rolling Stones track.

Except we now know their name, we’re just left speculating the nature of their game.