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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Open Letter: Why did we rename Meta?

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"We're at the beginning of the next chapter of the Internet, and it's the next chapter of our company."

原文标题：《 Founder’s Letter, 2021 》

Source: Facebook

Translation:Chain catcher

Today, Facebook officially announced the change to Meta to show how serious the company is about the metasverse. Zuckerberg also wrote about why the company changed its name to Meta and how the company views and builds the meta-universe.

We're at the beginning of the next chapter of the Internet, which is the next chapter of our company.

In recent decades, technology has given people the ability to connect and express themselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mostly typed text on the site. When we had phones with cameras, the Internet became much more visual and mobile. With faster connections, video has become a richer way to share experiences. We've gone from desktop to web to mobile; From text to photos to video. But that's not the end.

The next platform will be more immersive -- a physical Internet that you can experience rather than just look at. We call it the meta-universe, and it touches every product we build.

The defining mass of the meta-universe will be a sense of being -- as if you were with another person or in another place. Being truly with another human being is the ultimate dream of social technology. That's why we focused on building it.

In the metasomes, you can do almost anything you can imagine -- get together with friends and family, work, study, play, shop, create -- and have entirely new experiences that don't fit with how we think of computers or phones today.

It's a future where you'll be able to teleport to the office as a hologram without commuting, attending concerts with friends, or chasing your parents' living room. No matter where you live, that opens up more opportunities. You'll be able to spend more time on the things that are important to you, reduce traffic time, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Think about how much physical stuff you have today, but in the future it might just be holograms. Your TV, your perfect working device with multiple monitors, your board games -- they're not real things assembled in a factory, but holograms designed by creators around the world.

You'll experience these experiences on different devices -- augmented reality glasses that can stay in the real world, VIRTUAL reality that can be fully immersed in, phones and computers that can jump in from existing platforms. It's not about spending more time on screens; It's about making the time we've already spent better.

Our roles and responsibilities

The meta-universe will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers, creating interoperable new experiences and digital projects, and unlocking a creative economy far greater than today's platforms and their policies constrain.

Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of foundational technologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the meta-universe to life and weave these technologies through our social media applications. We believe the meta-universe can provide a better social experience than anything in existence today, and we are committed to helping realize its potential.

As I wrote in our original founder letter, "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

This method is very helpful to us. We've built our business to support very large long-term investments to build better services, and that's what we plan to do here.

Over the past five years, I and our company have been ashamed of me in many ways. One of the main lessons I've learned is that it's not enough to just build products that people love.

The story of my growing appreciation of the Internet is not simple. Each chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks and disruptions to established interests. We need to work together from the start to make that best version of the future a reality.

Privacy and security need to be built into the meta-universe from day one. The same is true of open standards and interoperability. This requires not only novel technical work -- such as supporting encryption and NFT projects in the community -- but also new forms of governance. Most importantly, we need to help build ecosystems so that more people have a stake in the future, not only as consumers but also as creators.

It was also a frustrating time because, as a big company, we learned what it felt like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my view of the tech industry. I've come to believe that lack of choice for consumers and high fees for developers are stifling innovation and hampering the Internet economy.

We try to take a different approach. We want our services to be available to as many people as possible, and that means trying to keep costs down, not higher. Our mobile app is free. Our advertising model is designed to provide the lowest price for businesses. Our business tools are available at cost or for a modest fee. So billions of people love our services and hundreds of millions of businesses depend on our tools.

This is what we want to use to help build the metasverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or with subsidies so that more people can use them. We will continue to support loading and streaming from the PC side so that people have the option, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find applications or reach customers. Our goal is to provide developers and creators in as many cases as possible at low cost so that we can maximize the overall creative economy. However, we need to make sure we don't lose too much money in the process.

We hope that within the next decade, the metasurverse will reach 1 billion people, carry hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and provide jobs for millions of creators and developers.

Who we are

As we started the next chapter, I thought a lot about what this meant for our company and our identity.

We are a company focused on connecting people. While most tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we've been focused on building technology so that people can interact with each other.

Today, we are considered a social media company. Facebook is one of the most widely used technology products in the history of the world. It's an iconic social media brand.

Building social applications will always be important to us, and there's a lot more to build. But more and more, that's not all we do. In our DNA, we built technology to bring people together. The meta-universe is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networks were when we first started.

Now our brand is so tied to a product that it can't possibly represent everything we do today, let alone anything in the future. Over time, I want us to be seen as a meta-cosmic company, and I want to Orient our work and our identity to the goals we're building.

We just announced that we are making fundamental changes to our company. We now view and report on our business as two separate parts: one for our family of applications and one for our work on future platforms. Our work on the metasverse is not just one of these parts. The meta-universe contains social experiences and futuristic technologies. As we broaden our horizons, now is the time for us to adopt a new brand.

To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I am proud to announce that our company is now Meta.

Our mission remains the same -- it's still about bringing people together. Our app and its brand haven't changed either. We're still a company that designs technology around people.

But all of our products, including our apps, now have a new vision: to help bring the meta-universe to life. Now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

From now on, we will be meta-universe first, not Facebook first. This means that over time, you will no longer need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand begins to appear in our products, I hope that people around the world will learn about the Meta brand and the future we represent.

I used to study the classics, and the word "meta" comes from the Greek word meaning "beyond." To me, it symbolizes that there's always more to build, that there's always another chapter to the story. Our story begins in our dorm room and goes beyond our imagination; Into a range of apps that people use to connect with each other, find their own voices, and start world-changing businesses, communities, and movements.

I'm proud of what we've done so far, and I'm excited about what's next -- because we're moving beyond what's possible today, beyond the limits of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, to a place where everyone can be with each other, creating new opportunities and experiencing new things. This is a future that is bigger than any one company and will be created by all of us together.

We've built something that brings people together in new ways. We have learned lessons from struggling with difficult social issues and living behind closed doors. Now it's time to use everything we've learned to help build the next chapter.

I put a lot of effort into this -- more than any other company in the world. If that's the future you want to see, I hope you'll join us. The future will be beyond our imagination.