It was 7 a.m. Western time, just after dawn in Silicon Valley, and the signage was covered with a curtain in front of Facebook headquarters. Everything was in order, a meeting to rewrite the destiny was about to take place.
At 11:13, Zuckerberg stood at the event venue in high spirits, after explaining Facebook’s understanding of the Metaverse and the strategic planning and various progress made.
“Today, we have one more important thing to share with you,” Zuckerberg said.
He walked slowly down the stairs and into the Facebook office area.
“We’ve decided to rebrand ourselves. Over time, I hope that in the future we will no longer be just a social platform, but will be seen as a Metaverse company.”
On October 28, 2021, seventeen years and eight months after its founding, Facebook officially announced its strategic transformation.
The familiar thumbs-up logo was removed and replaced by a new logo resembling “infinity” and a new name — Meta.
A new Metaverse era officially opened the curtain.
My first reaction when I saw this news: all in the Metaverse! Zuckerberg really dare to bet!
However, after sitting down and thinking about it, there is actually not much difference. The Facebook we use is still called Facebook, but now the product Facebook has become part of the Meta company.
The concept of “metaverse” first originated in 1992 from Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel “Snow Crash”. The so-called “metaverse” can be understood as a virtual world that exists in parallel with the real world. In this immersive virtual space, everyone has a virtual double that can socialize, shop, entertain, etc., and may eventually form independent social rules and economic systems.
The movie “ Ready Player One “ is recognized as the most consistent with the presentation of the metaverse scene.
Behind this metaverse all in, is it a hope? Or is it a great escape for facebook?
Despite sitting on the world’s largest traffic pool, it is undeniable that Facebook has long ceased to be calm in these years and is still struggling in the vortex.
From a fundamental point of view, the slowdown of Facebook’s user growth has become the norm. And from a profit model point of view, the development of advertising business is not as expected. On the other hand, competitors are catching up and putting new pressure on the brand.
What’s even more deadly is that over the past few years, the successive dirt on Zuckerberg has made Facebook and himself even more anxious.
In 2018, Facebook was blasted for data leaks, violating user privacy, and even influencing the U.S. election and Britain’s exit from the European Union, when the action to delete Facebook erupted online and everyone accused Zuckerberg and Facebook of sacrificing user safety and seeing profit and forgetting justice.
Last year, Facebook was again characterized as a monopoly by the U.S. House of Representatives, which said Facebook Facebook maintains a monopoly in online advertising and social media by acquiring, copying, and stifling its competitors.
In this case, Cook also came to “mock” Zuckerberg. He said Facebook is an “ecosystem of corporations, data mongers, news fakers, hot money speculators and scoundrels, whose survival is based on monitoring user behavior and placing targeted ads”, a great unscrupulous enterprise.
The company has been proud of the “humane office” was also slapped in the face.
Some time ago, two former employees of Zuckerberg’s family office took Zucker himself, his wife Priscilla and the family business to court. And the “charges” actually included “discrimination, sexual harassment and unpaid wages”.
And the “perfect” image Zuckerberg has built up over the years is crumbling.
The congressional hearing he was summoned to in 2018 for leaking user privacy, his face became so strange that it could be described as stiff, sparking a big wave of discussion among internet users — is Zuckerberg a robot?
At the same time, the dirt on him during the start-up period has also been constantly rehashed, accused of plagiarism and abandoning partners in the early stage, and controversial in the late stage, and was also made into a movie “Social Network” by David Fincher.
The road to the metaverse is destined to be difficult and long. Even today, when the name change was announced, Facebook’s share price rose by about 4% at one point and finally fell back to 1.5%, which shows that people are not buying into its metaverse vision across the board.
It’s not easy to let go of the social media empire you’ve built with your own hands, but Zuckerberg had to.
As Zuckerberg himself said, a metaverse is not just a virtual identity, but one that encompasses “a realistic sense of live social interaction, extremely low latency, diverse content, a complete economic system, and the security and stability of technology.”
Change the name, once again emphasizing a distant but bright future, whether the metaverse can save Facebook from the suffering? I’m afraid this issue still needs time to prove.
Writer:BIXIN
- 11
- 7
- Action
- Advertising
- All
- among
- announced
- AREA
- board
- business
- Buying
- change
- company
- competitors
- content
- Corporations
- Court
- data
- Development
- Early
- early stage
- Economic
- economic system
- Election
- employees
- Enterprise
- European
- european union
- Event
- Exit
- Exodus
- Face
- family
- Fiction
- Finally
- First
- follow
- form
- future
- great
- Growth
- GV
- High
- House
- house of representatives
- hr
- HTTPS
- ia
- Identity
- image
- immersive
- interaction
- Internet
- IP
- IT
- Justice
- Leaks
- logo
- Long
- Media
- medium
- Meta
- model
- money
- monitoring
- months
- movie
- news
- online
- online advertising
- order
- Other
- partners
- People
- planning
- platform
- player
- Point of View
- pool
- pressure
- price
- privacy
- Product
- Profit
- reaction
- real world
- robot
- rules
- Safety
- Science
- security
- sense
- Share
- Silicon Valley
- So
- Social
- social media
- Space
- Stability
- Stage
- Start-up
- Strategic
- system
- Systems
- Technology
- Thinking
- time
- traffic
- Transformation
- u.s.
- U.S. House of Representatives
- union
- user privacy
- users
- View
- Virtual
- virtual world
- vision
- W
- Wave
- world
- year
- years