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.
Social
media giant Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name next
week.
As per The Verge, the
company is planning to change its name to reflect its focus on building the
metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
The name change, which
CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company's annual Connect
conference on October 28, 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.
Facebook already has more
than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that
Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones.
In July, he told The Verge
that, over the next several years, "we will effectively transition from
people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse
company."
A 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 currently.
Facebook isn't the first
well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In
2015, Google reorganised entirely under a holding company called Alphabet,
partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling
conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech.
Snapchat also rebranded to
Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a "camera
company" and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.
According to The Verge, the
new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not
known widely, even among its full senior leadership.
A possible name could have
something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of
Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few
years.
The name of that app was
recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for
workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms.
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.
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 this summer.