No Gruber, this is why Facebook renamed itself

John Gruber:

I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse thing doesn’t come up once, not even once, even in passing.

Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the company to rebrand itself as something amazing and fresh.

Facebook, if nothing else, is good at diverting attention away from itself and its pesky public relations nightmares. It doesn’t matter how bad things get – they know that everything becomes the proverbial fish wrap in time. 

But again, some of us old-timers have always known that what Zuck says and what he means are two different things. 

Update: Gruber is on fire today.

And so “Meta” will never be remembered as the company that spearheaded the metaverse — because the metaverse never was or will be an actual thing — it’s in truth the perfect name for a company that believes in nothing other than its own success.