Facebook, Menlo Park, Twitter discussed on The Vergecast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Can I congratulate you? One of our senior video folks of your empathic. Raced out to Menlo Park and took a picture of them changing the sign in front of the Facebook headquarters to say meta. They did it. They were right. That was heroic. That was heroic. So basically, a couple hours before the keynote started, they put a giant cloth, not apples, of course, but a cloth over the like sign by Facebook headquarters. And Menlo Park, then all of a sudden on Twitter, everyone's trying to get the angle of the people painting the new logo on drawing it on the sign. What is it? It's like this infinity type thing, and yeah, V race down there got some great photos. And they really did this just orchestrated like everything changed at once like all the execs on Twitter or changing their Twitter handles. Their bios and yeah, it's meta. And it is meta in the fact that it is meta, just a lot of layers to this. But yeah, I talk to Mark Zuckerberg about it. And we covered a bit of ground. He had some things to say about crypto that I had never heard him talk about and how they're excited about blockchain, smart contracts. For the metaverse, we talked about Succession, you know, ask them, are you still going to be CEO and chairman in 5 years? And he said, probably. I was really hoping you met the TV show. I wanted to hear his thoughts on shit. Disclosure, that's my only joke in this section, my partner works for, I guess meta now, so. Meta, well, that's a thing, so Oculus, the Oculus name is going away as part of this. It's now going to be the meta quest, the meta portal is such a horrible. It's not great. Can't wait to edit those reviews. So the reasoning that suck gave you in the transcript is on the site, you can read it and then next week we'll have interview with Andrew bosworth, the CTO on decoder, the Alex said it's great. But the reasonings that gave you was this is getting confusing for people. Facebook is a product. People didn't want to log into their quest for the Facebook account. And people really did not want to log into their Oculus quest for the Facebook account. There was a lot of backlash to that. I think this may just kind of surprise people. One of the main reasons that they changed the brand of the company that has been the same for 17 years is one of the most recognizable brands in the world is because Mark got concerned that people hated logging into quest with their Facebook accounts. There's another solution to that. Make sure? Maybe maybe don't force people to log into Facebook. But it's not. Well, no, no, no. You would think that it might be, you know, the Facebook name being dragged in the mud constantly by the media for all the problems, all the hate speech misinformation, the toxicity of that brand. No, like, the first thing he talked about was logging into quest. And I think that's an important, it shows his frame of mind and how he has act legitimately obsessed with this stuff. And is thinking almost like exclusively about this more futuristic phase of the company and not really at all what people are focused on right now. He's thinking about people's concerns with a product that maybe has 10 million headsets in circulation, maybe definitely Facebook's smallest product besides portal. Yeah, but here's the good faith pushback on that. I find I buy it. The reason people don't like logging into their quest headsets with their Facebook accounts is because Facebook is associated with toxicity and sharing things you don't want to share. Of course, but my point is that the vector of the concern for him is the quest. It's not like blew up, which shows you just how obsessed he is with this stuff. Is this like the moment that they're unifying all of their hardware under this new name and stuff, right? Because the portal also nobody wants because Facebook. And they're going to do these glasses and nobody wants them because of Facebook. And this is kind of their way to be like, yeah, now we're into hardware, fully unified under this new dumb name. And also Facebook's over there forget about it. It doesn't exist. Yeah, so you can't see it. That is definitely part of it. And there's going to be this new unified account system. And the details are very slim, but it's going to include Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, which has been separate this whole time. A meta account system that you can have that will span everything and you can choose if you want to drop it into an app or the quest or whatever. The meta smart watch, whatever else is coming. It sounds like they haven't ironed that out though. He was pretty vague about it, but he said part of this is he wants a brand that supersedes everything that is not one of the apps and obviously one of the apps that has the most toxicity tied to its name. But he used the word iconic like Facebook is the most iconic social media brand with me like three times, which is like his way of saying, I'm not totally throwing this team under the bus. Mostly. But yeah, it was a very interesting interview. I mean, he was pretty blunt and I was like, look, man, everyone's going to say you're doing this just a distance from all the scandals of the past few weeks, the whistleblower Francis haugen, the Facebook papers that we and others reported on. And he was like, that's ridiculous. He was like, we started this over 6 months ago. He's been thinking about this actually for years, formally kicked off the project 6 months ago. And he was like, if I didn't think we were running towards something versus running away from something with something this big, changing the name, then I wouldn't be doing it, which believe that if you want. But it was fascinating. The whole rebrand story is fascinating to me. He made employees inside Facebook signs separate NDAs to work on the reprint because it was so top secret. Yeah, it was it's been an interesting week..