Should you fear Facebook’s Metaverse?
The Facebook’s metaverse is on everyone’s lips since the group changed its name to Meta, derived from the word “Metaverse”, a not-so-new notion preached by Mark Zuckerberg.
You’ve probably all heard about the Metaverse, this hypothetical virtual reality realm that aims at interconnecting people in “completely immersive ways”, Zuckerberg said.
But far from an anecdotical rebranding, Facebook’s shift to Meta in fact reflects an alarming decline of the brand’s popularity:
In reality, why would Meta want to dissociate itself from the original platform it created, and today gathering nearly 3 billion people?
Facebook has been affected in the last few years by a generational problem: the youngest generations don’t want to be on Facebook anymore, because this is the social media that their parents are using. Simple as that. They prefer Instagram, Snapchat, or, more recently, TikTok.
But this shift in usage among the younger generations is not the only reason for a name change. There have been many scandals around the name of Facebook in the past decade. Cambridge Analytica is one of them and has proven the company’s questionable intentions.
By “dropping” Facebook, Meta is hoping to get another chance to prove to people that it can still protect user data.
What are Mark Zuckerberg’s true intentions here about Facebook’s metaverse ? To figure it out, we need to go beyond this name change and understand how Meta will benefit from it.
Read the full article here on LinkedIn.