Facebook planning to change its name

The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more.

Social media giant Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name next week.

As per The Verge, the company is planning to change its name to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company's annual Connect conference on October 28, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant's ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail.

The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more.

Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones.

In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, "we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company."

A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates currently.

Facebook isn't the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google reorganised entirely under a holding company called Alphabet, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech.

Snapchat also rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a "camera company" and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.

According to The Verge, the new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership.

A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years.

The name of that app was recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms.

Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on the next generation of technology.

This past summer it set up a dedicated metaverse team.

More recently, it announced that the head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to chief technology officer.

Just a couple of days ago, Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe.

The metaverse is "going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet," Zuckerberg told The Verge's Casey Newton this summer.

Zuckerberg added, "And I think it's going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area."

The term "metaverse" was famously coined by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel 'Snow Crash', where it referred to a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people.

Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters