The Short Modern Attention Span Is Not THAT Short
"Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name," writes Alex Heath at The Verge.
Wow. We'll all be so fooled and swayed to think differently!
Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.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. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.
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."
The likely real reason or main reason for the change:
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 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.
We are not intellectual goats. Probably all of us figured this out!
And I'm pretty smart and know the meaning of "meta" (and read a lot of meta-analyses -- many complete shit methodologically) for my next two books (Bookmonster #1 and #2), and I do not know what the metaverse is. It does, however, have a creepy, dystopian air. Heath again:
Complicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks, it's still not a concept that's widely understood. The term was coined originally by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world. Now it's being adopted by one of the world's largest and most controversial companies -- and it'll have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.
It isn't that people don't know what 'meta' means. The 'metaverse' as promoted by Facebook is poorly defined advertising speak and once you get through that it really isn't that interesting.
Ben at October 21, 2021 4:59 AM
I tried ello and that other one.
Ultimately what made FB work for me was that people used their real names so I could look up people I knew.
When people used weird handles like LovesBellyDancing75 or whatever, I had no idea who the fuck they were. I might know the handles of my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I'd like to stay in touch with on a more superficial level that I couldn't find.
NicoleK at October 21, 2021 11:10 AM
Early email days were like that, too. People chose weird names instead of simple firstnamelastname@provider.com names. I know I want to email Jeff, but is he DogLoverJeff@aol.com or CatHaterJeff@gmail.com? Then, some of them started getting their own domains and that just made everything ridiculous; so I'm emailing firstname@firstnamecatnamehobby.com.
Conan the Grammarian at October 21, 2021 11:18 AM
"Early email days were like that, too. "
In college I was "longhorngirl" on my email. I'm forever indebted to the prof who informed me that was childish and unprofessional. I've been firstnamelastname@____ ever since. Never had to add a number, either. From what the interwebs can tell me, there's only one other of my name in existence.
momof4 at October 21, 2021 6:22 PM
"Early email days were like that, too. "
In college I was "longhorngirl" on my email. I'm forever indebted to the prof who informed me that was childish and unprofessional. I've been firstnamelastname@____ ever since. Never had to add a number, either. From what the interwebs can tell me, there's only one other of my name in existence.
momof4 at October 21, 2021 6:24 PM
Heh. If you know the domain of a Federal contractor, and the name of the person you wish to contact, your email will get there with firstname.lastname@federalsitename.gov.
Of course, script kiddies know this, which is why I don't use my realname on social media sites or blogs. My old database has been trashed along with a couple of thousand manhours of my work due to a Federal mandate about email age - probably to avoid political embarrassment - but there's no point in changing now.
Radwaste at October 21, 2021 8:37 PM
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