From Facebook To Meta

In this era, we don't predict the future, we create the future.

By Shiwen Li

Welcome to Metaverse

Please imagine that you are in another world when you appear in an arrangement of 0101 ---- You are standing on a hundred-metre wide street illuminated by neon lights and screens, looking at the street that runs through the whole world, and hundreds of millions of people, like you, are seeing the the same sight. Here anyone has the ability to customise their image, travel in virtual vehicles, acquire virtual real estate and engage in the full range of human social activities in a virtual world. Like the oasis world conceived in the film Ready Player One, we all live in a new digital form in an immersive utopian world.

This is how Zuckerberg imagines the future, and what he expects from Meta(Founder's Letter,2021)：

I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things.

What is Meta?

Meta is the world's largest social networking platform, with products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Oculus. According to Statista data, as of October 2021, Meta's Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram,and Messenger, were ranked first, third, fourth, and fifth in the world's most popular social media.

But Meta's history was not built overnight, and to make Meta what it is today, it can be attributed mainly to two parts: acquisition and advertising.

April 2012, US$1 billion acquisition of Instagram
Feb 2014, $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp
March 2014, $20 billion acquisition of Oculus

In August 2011, Facebook launched FacebookMessenger, a separate mobile application for personal messages.
Prior to this, as Facebook was rapidly gaining popularity and becoming the preferred social tool for young people, more and more users were abandoning traditional IM software such as MSN and choosing to use Facebook for communication. However, due to the many features of Facebook, its official mobile application was quite complicated and could not meet the needs of users who wished to use IM for quick chats. Facebook Messenger, however, was split from Facebook's messaging function and was for real-time chat only.

In April 2012, Facebook spent $1 billion to acquire Instagram, a social photo sharing product that had gained nearly 30 million users and a good reputation for its superior filtering and mobile social experience. With this acquisition, Facebook turned a major potential challenger on mobile into a piece of its business landscape, and as a result of this acquisition, Instagram added 10 million users in 10 days and another 40 million in the next four months.

In February 2014, Facebook chose to complete its social landscape by acquiring WhatsApp, the world's largest instant messaging product, for a whopping $19 billion, whose competitiveness lies in its simplicity and purity, and the fact that when users are tired of the big, comprehensive Facebook app model, there is a small, compact option like Whatsapp. There is Instagram to use to look at pictures, and no matter what the user's taste in demand is, they cannot escape from using the five fingers of the Facebook app.

The only way to retain users is to have a future for Facebook

Zuckerberg said in the 2021 Q2 Earnings Call Transcript that as we begin the next chapter, advertising will continue to be an important part of the social media part of the strategy, and it will probably become a meaningful part of the metaspace as well.

Essentially, Facebook is a giant advertising company that provides advertisers with precise ad placement services by tracking data on its users, from which it earned $50 billion in advertising revenue last year alone, with its advertising revenue accounting for 98% of its total revenue.

Of these, Facebook's core is all types of advertising (including mobile stream ads and right-hand display ads.) Instagram relies heavily on ads for images, videos, rotations, and Stories. And Messenger offers dynamic message ads via Messenger Bot AI customer service. LIve Rail, acquired in 2014, is responsible for video ads. (Meta For Businsess)

According to an article by The Economist, Facebook's targeted advertising is "incredibly accurate". It can selectively recommend products to specific users, identify other users with similar interests and determine whether they have purchased the product after seeing the ad. This accuracy is irresistible to small companies and big global brands alike. And with this, Facebook earns $8 per user per quarter, which is almost twice as much as Twitter.

In a nutshell, the value of Facebook lies in the fact that users cannot live without it.

From mapping society, to rebuilding it, Mata redefines the behavioural patterns of a social being, and in turn redefines life after digitalisation.

As mentioned before, Meta's long-term strategic goal is to connect the world and bring people closer to each other. To achieve this goal, Meta is constantly planning and iterating its own product plan for the next 5-10 years. In 2016, Zuckerberg gave a 10 year roadmap to substantiate this long-term strategic plan.

Over the next 3 years (2016-2019), build on the Facebook ecosystem optimization so that it continues to help people connect better.
In the next 5 years (2016-2021), start with Video, Search, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, so that users around the world can share a wide variety of content (text, images, videos) through these products under Meta.
In the next 10 years (2016-2026), Meta will vigorously develop its core technologies to make a qualitative contribution to human connectivity in the direction of web hardware, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and so on.

From this 10-year product roadmap, we can see that Meta's strategic goals are very focused, and the products it builds and acquisitions it makes are all focused on this core strategic goal.

Only five years after 2016, Facebook has announced that it is embracing the metaverse, which is still very much in line with its core strategic goal. The concept of metaverse brings the virtual world and the real world together perfectly, and is the "ultimate" state of connection between people. So by embracing the metaverse, Facebook can get closer to its strategic goal of "empowering people to build groups and bring the world closer together".

This move by Facebook demonstrates Facebook's efforts to build better connections between people, and shows the outside world a rosy picture of the kind of human connections that can be achieved in the future. But at this point in time, Facebook has also changed its name to Meta, a big move that may be aimed at solving another, more realistic problem.

Troubles keep coming

Meta has been described by many as the "next generation of the Internet". The metaverse has the ability to connect many people together. As a platform, the metaverse is bound to record a lot of private data. However, recently Facebook has been in a lot of trouble with privacy issues.

According to media reports, Facebook is currently suffering from its worst PR crisis: former employees have publicly criticised Facebook and gained global attention - Francis Haugan, a former member of Facebook's Civic Integrity team, has revealed four major insider secrets of the company.

Facebook treats politicians, celebrities and ordinary users differently
Facebook taken to court by shareholder
Instagram and other social apps endanger youth health
Facebook puts profit before public safety

This was also followed by Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist, also publicly denounced Facebook as the second whistle blower for using "false engagement" to distort the spread of the story.

"During my three-year tenure, I found numerous blatant attempts by foreign governments to misuse our platform to mislead their citizens and to generate international news on multiple occasions."

For example, a Facebook post by Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez received so many fake likes that more than 78% of his 500,000 followers were not real people.

The Wall Street Journal is quoted as reporting that Facebook executives are indifferent to the health of young girls, while at the same time, they do not want to make major internal changes to Facebook or stop the spread of misinformation such as vaccines. What's even more chilling is that Monika Bickert, a former respected lawyer and diplomat who is now head of global policy management at Facebook, refuses to acknowledge that social media apps like Instagram are causing harm to young women, saying that "most young people on Instagram have a good experience ".

In addition to the things mentioned by the two whistle blowers above, Facebook is still facing a series of problems such as poor privacy protection, false information, political interference, monopoly allegations and the collapse of founder Zuckerberg's image, which is still a sword of Damocles over Facebook's head.

All the above mentioned may only serve as a catalyst, the core root cause is still that Facebook holds half of the world's users' social privacy data, and can also influence and even sway users' emotions, perceptions and positions through the information, this power is too scary, which would have given people enough reasons to regulate and beware of it in various ways. Yet, Zuckerberg still chose to change Facebook's name to Meta at this most anxious time, and also painted many meta scenarios. While many have since questioned Zuckerberg's move as a way to distract the public from the negative news about Facebook, the name change is not only a sign of Facebook's commitment to the meta-universe, but also the beginning of its corporate image rebranding.

Betting on the Metaverse

Beyond social media, Meta's future is imaginative

28 October 2021 is destined to be a historic day in the history of Facebook. At its annual conference called Facebook Connect, Facebook announced that it was changing its company name to “META” and that the company's stock symbol would change to “MVRS” from December 1.

As a social networking platform with 2.9 billion daily active users, Facebook has been thinking about how to keep its users from getting bored with it. CEO Zuckerberg said - "In addition to being the next generation of the Internet, metaspace will be our next chapter."

In the video, Zuckerberg said, "Today, we're often thought of as for a social media company, but in our company's DNA, we're a company that builds technology that connects people. The metaverse is the next frontier of technology, just as it was when we built the social web."

1.VR is more than just a toy

The term "metaverse" was first used in science fiction to represent a 3D virtual world parallel to reality. Facebook/Meta, which has shifted people's social lives from offline to online, is poised to break down the boundaries between virtual and reality and truly realize the goal of a "metaverse". In simple terms, people correspond to a new identity in a virtual world that they will "live" without interruption.

According to an article in The Economist, Zuckerberg's biggest bet is the “Metaverse”. When he bought virtual reality (VR) device maker Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, many thought he was buying himself a toy.

But in recent years, Facebook has bought several other VR companies, such as the recently acquired BigBoxVR, and Facebook may have done so in part to reduce its dependence on hardware makers . Last year, sales of Oculus head-mounted displays contributed about $1 billion to Facebook's revenue. Now that gaming has grown into an industry with $180 billion in global revenue, it's clear that VR and AR will become a heavy hitter in the gaming industry if the technology continues to improve.

2. Oculus also change its name

Everyone already knew about Facebook's own name change to Meta, but that wasn't the only name change Facebook announced at the time. Oculus, the biggest name in VR, was also going away. And Andrew Bosworth, Meta's VP of AR/VR, spelled out the change clearly in a post on October 28th.

In Bosworth's own words:"We’re simplifying our brand architecture and shifting away from the Oculus brand for our hardware. Starting in early 2022, you’ll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time."

This name change is more than just getting rid of the Oculus brand. Meta is using this opportunity to more clearly unify the metaspace initiative under one brand. For ~~Facebook~~ Meta and its Oculus customers, this is the remarkable end of an era and the beginning of something new.

3.Key to the metaverse

In the foreword, Zuckerberg describes a virtual ideal world "without leaving home", and to truly achieve this goal, Oculus' VR devices are the most important key to unlocking the metaverse.

Facebook was laying out the next generation of internet and the next generation of social in 2015, so it acquired Oculus, the best VR headset company in the world at that time. In the past few years Meta hasn't stopped either, on the one hand constantly going to optimize the experience of the headset (and also doing a lot of subsidies to sell the headset to lay the foundation), on the other hand also building a virtual space social platform. The game is the first stop in the metaverse, in which it simulates a small entertainment kingdom, from which analogies can be drawn to later life, for example by simulating a shopping mall scenario, and retail e-commerce will also be simulated online.

If we are going to go into a more immersive internet, we need a hardware that is different from the current smartphone and can give us a stronger sense of immersion, VR/AR it becomes very important and it could be the key to open the door to the metaverse. With the promotion of Oculus and other related companies, the number of units shipped in VR is probably in the millions, and it has been growing in recent years. But if we want to truly realize the metaverse imagination, if VR devices are to be universally popular and become a smartphone level hardware, Meta may still have a long way to go.