Facebook changed its name to Meta, a beautiful adventure or a broken arm?

Recently, Facebook announced to change its name to Meta. Facebook gave up the brand it had created over the years and re-established the Meta brand. Today, let's discuss the intention behind Facebook's name change. Meta is taken from the concept of "metaverse" recently proposed by Facebook. The core of the metaverse is a virtual reality space created based on virtual reality technology. This should be the new shape of the future online world envisaged by Facebook, the social networking giant. The virtual digital space created based on virtual reality technology can provide a more cool social environment than reality. Thus Facebook also hopes to use this new form to re-attract the public to Facebook's social network. Virtual reality technology is not a completely new technology, why is Facebook betting on virtual reality today and developing a new generation of social networking platform?

There may be the following reasons behind this. First, Facebook is in deep brand crisis due to the sale of personal information.

About 50 million people's social profiles are used by Cambridge analytics without users' knowledge. Facebook urgently needs to change its name to get rid of the negative publicity associated with the Facebook brand. Due to the brand crisis, a large number of celebrities announced the uninstallation and boycott of Facebook. This includes Elon Mask.

Point 2, Facebook's advertising business has suffered due to the platform ban. Facebook's main profit comes from advertising. Recently, major platforms have begun to block Facebook's advertising platform in the name of privacy. In particular, the app anti-tracking mechanism introduced by Apple ios 14 makes it impossible for Facebook to track user behavior and accurately deliver ads. Facebook is expected to lose more than 40 percent on advertising. If other platforms follow up, it will further reduce Facebook's profit margin. Without its own platform, Facebook desperately needs to find new revenue streams.

Point 3 is Facebook's loss of competition in video. In this new round of traffic competition, especially in the video field, Facebook lost to platforms such as Youtube, Netflix and Douyin, and has basically lost its competition in the video field.

Based on the above points, Facebook urgently needs to find the next growth point. As a social media giant, it's all about taking up users' time. Facebook chose to use virtual reality technology as its breakthrough. Of course, Facebook has other positives as well. First of all, in terms of virtual reality technology, Facebook has its own hardware and can develop its own platform. In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus, which develops virtual reality hardware, for $2.3 billion. In 2018, the company was fully incorporated into Facebook. Today Facebook has turned the company into a major direction for the company. Owning the hardware and being able to develop its own platform will be a key to ensuring Facebook's future profitability in the space.

On the other hand, with the rise of NFT technology, Facebook saw a huge market for virtual item transactions. The virtual reality space will be an important platform for the trade display of virtual items. It's also a key factor in Facebook's rush to enter the market. In terms of virtual currency, Facebook announced the launch of an asset-backed Libra-like sovereign currency in 2019. Due to potential money laundering and other risks, this type of sovereign virtual currency has been neglected by regulatory authorities around the world. The technical reserves in this area can be applied to future virtual platforms. So these points are also some positive factors for Facebook to choose virtual reality.

But virtual reality technology still faces many challenges. First of all, compared with other applications, the acceptance of virtual reality is low, and the large-scale adoption is difficult to realize in the short term. Unlike virtual reality technology and online video, the reception ability of the public is low. On the other hand, the relevant technical reserves of virtual reality technology are insufficient, including virtual reality technology and corresponding network support technology, which are currently insufficient to support large-scale adoption. Of course, what is more important is that virtual space occupies an important part of human social life. The intervention of supervision will complicate the virtual reality platform. Based on the above viewpoints, digital space will become more and more important. Digital space should not be limited to screens. Immersive virtual reality experience may be one of the ways. Then Facebook, as a last resort attempt to create new cash flow, has an uncertain future.