Facebook could change its name TODAY at special event hosted by Mark Zuckerberg
FACEBOOK could change its name later today at a special event hosted by its billionaire boss.
Mark Zuckerberg is tipped to give his embattled company a brand new name at Facebook Connect.
The special event is used to showcase the company's brand new tech, typically around virtual reality.
VR, augmented reality and the "metaverse" are huge areas of investment for Facebook.
The company recently announced plans to hire an additional 10,000 staff to work on the metaverse.
Last week, The Verge reported that Facebook would rename itself during the event.
Facebook Connect starts at 10am California time, 1pm New York time and 6pm London time.
It'll be streamed over the internet for anyone to watch, totally free of charge.
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That's because it's a publicity event for Facebook, allowing tech mogul Zuckerberg to show off his firm's latest VR achievements.
We're expecting to hear news about the metaverse – a digital world layered on top of reality, where we can live, work and play.
It's also rumoured that we'll see new Oculus hardware.
Oculus is Facebook's VR headset division, which has seen huge success with the $299/£299 Oculus Quest 2 goggles.
What's in a name?
Facebook is widely expected to choose a name linked to the metaverse.
News of the rebrand set the internet alight last week, with joke names like "Bookface" and “Booky McBookface” going viral on social media.
A number of industry experts weighed in with more serious predictions based on information provided to The Verge by a source at Facebook.
Samidh Chakrabarti, who previously worked as Facebook’s civic integrity chief, reckons the US tech titan will operate under the moniker "Meta".
“My best guess for the new name: ‘Meta,'” Chakrabarti wrote on Twitter.
"But I'd prefer something more classic like simply 'A Mark Zuckerberg Production'."
The rebrand would likely position Facebook's social media app as one of many products under a parent company.
That parent company will also reportedly oversee groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and more.
It follows weeks of intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over Facebook's business practices.
Another realistic candidate for the new name is "Horizon" after a virtual reality platform the company has been developing.
That would be a nod to Zuckerberg's desire for his company to be better known for the metaverse.
Chakrabarti's guess of Meta, however, appears to have legs.
Bloomberg reported that Facebook appears to own Meta.com, for instance.
“The web address meta.com currently redirects to meta.org, the home of a biomedical research discovery tool developed under the stewardship of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-founded by the Facebook CEO,” the site said.
A WHOLE NEW WORLD
The concept of the metaverse is quickly becoming a buzzword in technology and business.
It generally refers to shared virtual world environments which people can access via the internet.
The term can refer to digital spaces which are made more lifelike by the use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR).
Some people also use the word metaverse to describe gaming worlds, in which users have a character that can walk around and interact with other players.
There is also a specific type of metaverse which uses blockchain technology. In these, users can buy virtual land and other digital assets using cryptocurrencies.
Many science fiction books and films are set in fully-fledged metaverses - alternative digital worlds which are indistinguishable from the real physical world. But this is still the stuff of fiction.
Currently, most virtual spaces look more like the inside of a video game than real life.
UNDER FIRE
It's been a tricky few weeks for Facebook.
The company was hit on October 4 by a huge outage that knocked its services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, offline for seven hours.
As if that wasn't enough, its suite of platforms went down yet again four days later. The faults were blamed on technological errors.
The outages rekindled calls from politicians and lawmakers to break up the California tech company.
Critics have argued for years that no single company should own three of the world's most popular communications platforms.
The downtime followed weeks of drip-fed leaks and revelations by a former Facebook staff member published by the Wall Street Journal.
Frances Haugen provided documents used in a WSJ investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram's harm to teenage girls.
And details from a significant number of Facebook documents have been leaked via the press in recent days.
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