Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at the company's Connect event that Facebook's new name will be Meta.
"We are a company that builds technology to connect," Zuckerberg said. "Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively larger creative economy. To reflect on who we are and what we hope to build.
Zuckerberg called Facebook, which he launched from his college dorm room in 2004, "a iconic social media company," but added that the name no longer "includes" everything the company does.
He said the company's future will focus on building virtual reality products that connect users through another medium. He predicted that one billion people will be in Metaverse in the next decade. Zuckerberg said the new virtual reality world will allow users to play video games, watch movies, attend concerts, collaborate with colleagues and gather with friends without leaving their living room.
In the coming years, Facebook expects people to no longer see it as a social networking company, but as a meta-company.
Metaverse, an acronym for "meta-universe", is a digital world where truth and the virtual world come together and allow people to move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment. In practical terms, it refers to augmented and virtual reality products and services. According to Zuckerberg, metaverse will be the next largest computing platform.
