In June, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, “We will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company,” with news to hire hundreds as the company pivots.
So the Oculus acquisition + Portal + Alexa? coming to life in a Fortnite / Roblox / AR/VR sort of environment the defines social media. What do you think??
Some great reads:
- UploadVR and David Heaney, What Exactly is Facebook’s Metaverse Group Building? “The defining quality of the metaverse will be presence,” Facebook Reality Labs’ Andrew Bosworth. “The feeling of really being there with people — and FRL has been focused on building products that deliver presence across digital spaces for years. Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences. But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.”
- Kif Leswing with CNBC, Facebook creates exec team to work on Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for a digital universe. “Vishal Shah, the executive in charge of product at Instagram, is among those joining Facebook’s new metaverse group.”
- ars Technica’s Tim De Chant poses more consideration of implications, Facebook’s metaverse gambit is a distraction from its deep-seated problems. “Facebook has faced its share of scrutiny in recent months. Lawmakers have been floating antitrust and Section 230 bills that would hit the company hard.” (btw, our take on that: Repealing Section 230 in the United States; Here’s the Implication
Implications are a little mind blowing. Not just the will it work, or should it, but how much it might change. Would love your thoughts.
I know this is an older post, but still 6 months out I think the Horizon metaverse as a product is really poised to replace their own social media, and Facebook is in a position to understand the unique challenges that are necessary to mediate community content. Ethics being one of the central questions to metaverses and privacy concerns, Facebook has been forged by fire in many senses, having a third of the world’s population as users, and as such are uniquely positioned to use their domain experience to remain the dominant player in the metaverse landscape, which is an inevitability at this stage of VR’s development. Not only that, but if they maintain that they are turning over a new ethical leaf with the rebrand, they do have the power, marketshare and hardware-to-user/creator pipeline to actually bring about the coming of age of VR itself. The interesting thing is that, based on user numbers, if they were a nation state, they would be by far the largest nation state in the world twice over. And now we’re talking about the design of essentially a new world untethered from geography, that will need ethical standards and regulations untethered from geopolitical powers in a way. I think we need to begin to recognize that with the advent of metaverses at large, including others like altspace and rec room among other 2.5D worlds like decentraland, the lack of tethering of geolocation as the sole source of community is going to require conversations that have much lagged behind in the public spectre about what should be done now that all our metaphysical dreams are about to come true. Do we want private entities to be documenting our actual conversations and storing them on their servers for an undisclosed amount of time? This medium provides great challenges but I think Facebook is actually just seeing what’s already in the cards for humans and technology. People have been using VR since its advent in 1959… it’s not new. It’s just that it’s financially, technologically, and politically expedient for Facebook to now jump onto the new ship as social media’s sailboats have begun to sink.
