Zuckerberg's Open Letter: Why Are We Renaming to Meta?

Source: Facebook Official Website

Compiled by: Gu Yu, Chain Catcher

Introduction: Today, Facebook officially announced its rebranding to Meta, showcasing the company's commitment to the metaverse. At the same time, Zuckerberg wrote about why the name change to Meta was necessary, how the company views the metaverse, and how it plans to build it.

We are at the beginning of the next chapter of the internet, which is also the next chapter for our company.

For decades, technology has given people the ability to connect and express themselves more naturally. When I founded Facebook, we primarily typed text on a website. When we got smartphones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connection speeds increased, video became a richer way to share experiences. We have moved from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this is not the end.

The next platform will be more immersive—a tangible internet where you can experience it, not just look at it. We call it the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.

The defining quality of the metaverse will be a sense of presence—like you are with another person or in another place. Being truly together with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That’s why we are focused on building it.

In the metaverse, you can do almost anything you can imagine—gather with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create—and have entirely new experiences that don’t fit our current view of computers or phones.

In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly to your office as a hologram, without commuting, attend concerts with friends, or catch up in your parents' living room. No matter where you live, this will create more opportunities. You will be able to spend more time on what matters to you, reduce travel time, and lessen your carbon footprint.

Think about how many physical things you have today that might just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, board games, and more—they won’t be physical objects assembled in factories but holograms designed by creators around the world.

You will experience these experiences on different devices—augmented reality glasses can stay in the real world, virtual reality can be fully immersive, and phones and computers can jump in from existing platforms. This isn’t about spending more time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.

Our Role and Responsibility

The metaverse will not be built by a single company. It will be constructed by creators and developers, creating new interoperable experiences and digital projects, unlocking a larger creative economy than today’s platforms and their policies allow.

Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of foundational technologies, social platforms, and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life and weave these technologies into our social media applications. We believe the metaverse can provide better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we are committed to helping realize its potential.

As I wrote in our original founders' letter: "We build services not to make money; we make money to build better services."

This approach has served us well. We have 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 have felt ashamed in many ways about myself and our company. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to just build products that people love.

I increasingly appreciate that the story of the internet is not simple. Each chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but it also brings new challenges, risks, and disruptions to established interests. We need to work together from the start to make the best version of this future a reality.

Privacy and security need to be built into the metaverse from day one. Open standards and interoperability do too. This requires not only novel technical work—like supporting encryption and NFT projects in the community—but also new forms of governance. Most importantly, we need to help build an ecosystem where more people can have a stake in the future, benefiting not just as consumers but also as creators.

This time has also been frustrating because, as a large company, we have also learned what it feels like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly affected my view of the tech industry. I have come to believe that the lack of choices for consumers and high fees for developers are stifling innovation and hindering the internet economy.

We are trying to take a different approach. We want as many people as possible to use our services, which means working to lower costs, not raise them. Our mobile apps are free. Our advertising model is designed to provide the lowest prices for businesses. Our business tools are offered at cost or for a modest fee. As a result, billions of people love our services, and millions of businesses rely on our tools.

This is how we want to help build the metaverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or subsidized prices to make them accessible to more people. We will continue to support sideloading and streaming from PCs so that people have choices, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. Our goal is to provide services to developers and creators at low costs whenever possible so that we can maximize the overall creative economy. However, we need to ensure that we don’t lose too much money in the process.

We hope that in the next decade, the metaverse will reach 1 billion people, support hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and provide job opportunities for millions of creators and developers.

Who We Are

As we begin this next chapter, I have thought a lot about what this means 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 have always focused on building technology so that people can communicate with each other.

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

Building social applications will always be important to us, and there is still much to build. But increasingly, that is not all we do. In our DNA, we have built technology that brings people together. The metaverse is the next frontier for connecting people, just like social networks were when we first started.

Now our brand is closely tied to a product that cannot possibly represent everything we do today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we will be seen as a metaverse company, and I want to position our work and our identity around the goals we are building towards.

We have just announced that we are making a fundamental change to our company. We now view our business as two distinct parts and report on them separately: one for our suite of apps and another for our work on future platforms. Our work on the metaverse is not just one of these parts. The metaverse encompasses social experiences and future technologies. As we broaden our vision, now is the time for us to adopt a new brand.

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

Our mission remains the same—it is still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands have not changed. We are 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 metaverse to life. Now we have a name that reflects the breadth of our work.

From now on, we will be metaverse-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 people around the world will come to understand the Meta brand and the future we represent.

I once studied classics, and the word "meta" comes from Greek, meaning "beyond." To me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and the story always has the next chapter. Our story began in a dorm room and has gone beyond our imagination; into a suite of apps that people use to connect with each other, find their voice, and build businesses, communities, and movements that change the world.

I am proud of everything we have done so far, and I am excited about what is to come—because we are going beyond what is possible today, beyond the limits of screens, beyond distance and physical constraints, into a future where everyone can be together, create new opportunities, and experience new things. This is a future that transcends any one company and will be co-created by all of us.

We have built something that brings people together in new ways. We have learned from grappling with difficult social issues and living under closed platforms. Now it is time to leverage everything we have learned to help build the next chapter.

I have poured a lot of energy into this—more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you will join us. The future will exceed our imagination.