Linked List: October 28, 2021

Thursday, 28 October 2021

Facebook’s New Name: Meta 

I wish I had written a post guessing at Facebook’s new name — I might have gotten this. Facebook telegraphed that their upcoming rebranding/restructuring was going to be centered on the concept of the metaverse, so in the back of my head, I was thinking “Metabook”. But if I had gotten serious enough to publish a guess, I might have realized that even keeping the “book” wasn’t going to work. It wouldn’t feel right. Facebook, the company, is a conglomerate, and one of those parts is an app/social network named Facebook. That’s why people have used the nickname “the blue app” to speak of the actual app, to clarify it from the company as a whole.

What Zuckerberg is trying to do is demote Facebook the social network to just one app among several in the company. So the company needed a name as different from “Facebook” as from “Instagram” or “WhatsApp”. (“Metagram” actually sounds cool; “MetaWhats” does not.) Thus, just Meta. Not saying I love it, but it’s not bad and it does fit their new strategic initiative.

The logomark is … hmm. I don’t hate it, but it clearly works best when animated in 3D. Static, it vaguely resembles goggles — which might be shortsighted. Some see other shapes.

On Taxing Billionaires 

Jason Kander, on Twitter:

Elon Musk: Beware! If they can tax a billionaire like me, they can tax you regular people too!

Regular People: We’ve been paying our taxes this whole time, bro.

Sometimes you really can compress a complex thought into a tweet. Like a truly great slogan, it focuses the mind in a way a nuanced essay can’t.