Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg still hasn’t settled on a new name for the company even though a rumored rebrand could arrive in a matter of days, tech newsletter Platformer reported.
The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more.
Citing two unnamed sources, journalist Casey Newton reported that the Facebook rebrand had been in the works for at least two months. A potential announcement could come as soon as Monday to coincide with Facebook’s company earnings call, sources told Newton.
The Verge reported last week that Facebook was planning to change its name as part of its future plan to become a “metaverse” company. The main Facebook app will reportedly retain its name, but the overarching company is set to be “rebranded.” The “metaverse” is a term borrowed from science-fiction, and refers to a future vision of the internet where people access the web using virtual-reality and augmented-reality headsets, rather than laptops and phones.
The rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.
Aside from Zuckerberg’s comments, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on the next generation of technology. This past summer it set up a dedicated metaverse team. More recently, it announced that the head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to chief technology officer. And, as Reuters reported, just a couple of days ago Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe.
The metaverse is “going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton last summer. “And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area.”
To confuse things further, one source told Newton that Facebook was leaning away from using “meta” in its new rebranded name, and a second said the name might not relate to the metaverse at all. Some sources said the rebrand could land this Thursday, when Facebook holds its Oculus Connect event. For their part, Facebook’s only comment has been, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”
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