Facebook celebrates its 20th birthday
#Facebook celebrates its 20th birthday and throws a #virtual party. It was also announced that many new features will be added to the #Meta family very soon.
Transcript
00:00 At the virtual event Facebook Connect, CEO Mark Zuckerberg borrowed a line from the late Steve Jobs.
00:07 There's one more thing.
00:08 That thing? A new name.
00:10 I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta.
00:17 Our mission remains the same. It's still about bringing people together.
00:21 Facebook and its family of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp will still keep their names.
00:26 But Zuckerberg says his company has a new North Star to follow, the Metaverse.
00:31 All right, perfect.
00:34 The Metaverse is an immersive world that combines avatars with virtual and augmented experiences.
00:41 From a technical perspective, they're doing a lot of great work.
00:44 And from how much better the avatars are today, much more realistic.
00:50 It was, you know, at the beginning I was struggling to figure out if he was real or not in the presentation.
00:56 He talked about using the Metaverse for work and so enhancing, if you like, collaboration.
01:02 The name change comes after some controversial weeks.
01:05 Whistleblower and former product manager Francis Haugen released thousands of internal Facebook documents to Congress.
01:13 The Facebook papers, as they're known, highlights, among other issues,
01:17 the social network's potential adverse impacts to the well-being of children
01:21 and its questionable approach to handling misleading and inflammatory content.
01:27 You might believe in the vision, and I do to some extent.
01:30 I think that some of the, you know, ingredients, if you like, to that Metaverse are going to happen
01:36 and are going to change our lives for the better.
01:40 But the concern of having a company like Facebook and a leader like Zuckerberg
01:47 be the one deciding how this is going to be developing is concerning.
01:54 Zuckerberg did discuss the importance of privacy.
01:57 Privacy and safety need to be built into the Metaverse from day one.
02:01 He also took a jab at competitors by talking about his commitment to keeping his company's ecosystem open for developers.
02:09 Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry.
02:15 Most of all, I've come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation,
02:21 stopping people from building new things and holding back the entire Internet economy.
02:27 I probably know that the only other company that they're going to be competing against,
02:31 at least to start with, will be Apple.
02:34 And so that idea of let's be open versus the closed Apple ecosystem.
02:42 Zuckerberg says he hopes within the next decade, the Metaverse will reach a billion people,
02:47 support millions of jobs and host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce.
02:52 Mark New, CGTN, San Francisco.