Zuckerberg Wants to Rebrand Facebook as "A Metaverse Company" - But His Fixation on Real Life Identities Will Be One of Many Barriers to Success

With a shout-out to Matthew Balls' Metaverse primer (its massive influence in the industry is why I'm blogging it part by part), Mark Zuckerberg just made a pretty startling announcement:

I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision in terms of building community and creators. So there’s a lot to jump into here. I’m curious what direction you want to take this in. But this is something that I’m spending a lot of time on, thinking a lot about, we’re working on a ton. And I think it’s just a big part of the next chapter for the work that we’re going to do in the whole industry.

My cynical take (and it's hard not to be cynical, when it comes to Facebook) is this move is made in great part to stave off anti-trust regulation that is now looming over his company. ("Hey we're not really a social media monopoly, look at us trying to compete with Epic/Apple/ROBLOX etc!") But in fairness, Zuckerberg has long been passionate about VR, buying Oculus (with founding Linden Cory Ondrejka's guidance) many years before the Facebook backlash reached fever pitch.

Related to that, the Metaverse may be the one technology platform that Zuckerberg cannot conquer:

For one thing, as he notes, "Quest 2 has been a real hit so far in terms of how people are using it"... which is one way to finesse the fact that Quest 2 sales are slow.

Even more key, Facebook's corporate culture is rooted in real life identities (and monetizing real life identities), while a core feature of any successful metaverse platform is the power to re-create one's identity from the ground up. This is particularly true among the very young for whom metaverse creation has become core to experimenting with identity, in a safe virtual space where they won't be judged. And the very young dominate the metaverse. (Speaking of which, heard anything interesting about Facebook Horizon lately? Me neither.)

More on this soon-ish, but read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Kyz]

Heheh, Zuck will join a list of companies that thought they were the Metaverse. It's a data mining company, not an innovator of Metaverse technology.

Love that picture though, it should be captioned "What the Metaverse is not".

[sirhc desantis]

'..people seeing us as primarily being a social media company..' Odd. Thats not how I see it at all:)
But yes - that RL identity thing again. Wasn't that a focus of that HiSomething fail as well? Although will add that the audio stuff was a take on stuff that had been done before

[Rin]

** Love that picture though, it should be captioned "What the Metaverse is not". **

I would rather say, that this is the Metaverse. But it is the Metaverse as it is envisioned by people like Zuck and the likes of him. As a tool they control and that is set up perfectly for mindless consumption since for such people a thinking customer is a bad customer.

[Kyz]

@Rin: True. One good test is whether the innovator eats their own dogfood. Consider Rosedale for SL or Zuck for VR. They didn't actually use their own technologies for meetings, or education, or running their company infrastructure.

If it doesn't grow hair and cure warts for the huckster it probably doesn't for anyone else, either.

It's a novelty for a while and then many of these sectors fall back on more traditional methods that work.

That's why my money is on these larger companies that are concentrating more on the technology than the hair tonic, like the game engines, the graphics card companies, etc. The consumers of these products will determine if they can build it out into successful Metaverse implementations.

[Joey1058]

I'm late to this one. Before I read this, I got this from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/AlonGrinshpoon/status/1418968473573658629?s=20

Yeah, ol'Zuck has something up his sleeve.

[Wagner James Au]

"Consider Rosedale for SL or Zuck for VR. They didn't actually use their own technologies for meetings, or education, or running their company infrastructure"

I can't speak for Zuck, but Philip definitely held regular Linden staff meetings in SL back in the day and definitely does regular staff meetings in HiFi now.

[Kyz]

@Wagner: Ah, I stand corrected.

[Adeon Writer]

Blizzard's Battle.net game distribution client also requires your real name, just like Facebook. Yet I don't see anyone complaining about that.

Just like Facebook, it's required to sign up, but other players can't see it. Every World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Overwatch, or Diablo player give away their real identity in order to make an account and buy games from their service.

I feel people are overly harsh on Facebook doing it. It's really not out of the ordinary.

As long as those names aren't required to be public-facing, you only need to worry about Facebook's obsession with profiting off your data. No metaverse will work if everyone knows your real name just by seeing you - and Facebook knows that.