Face to Face

A CNN reporter posted the following question on Twitter yesterday --

So by the sounds of things Zuckerberg is announcing a new name for Facebook tomorrow. What is it going to be?

I offered the following suggestions --

​​The Facebook

Facebook 2.0

Face Book

Facebook+ 

Faceb00k

Facebook ETC.

Facebook!

Facebookpedia

The New Facebook

Zuckerbook

The Cracker Barrel

Winklevoss

Ye Olde Facebooke

Facebūk

Le Facebook

F-a-c-e-b-o-o-k

The Social Network

It turns out that, alas, I was wrong in all my guesses.  Facebook has just announced that they changed the parent company name to...

Wait, so Facebook isn't even changing the name of Facebook at all??!  They're just changing the name of the company!  Facebook will still be...Facebook.  Yes, that's quite the major change to signal the big changes that all its bad news has seemingly demanded.  Cool.

By the way, the new name of the parent company will be Meta.

On the one hand, this is a perfectly good name for a huge tech company.  On the other hand -- "metadata" is the phenomenally valuable asset of user information that Facebook mines and sells to other companies.  (Maybe 15 years ago, I was interviewing someone at the Consumer Electronics Show and wrote about him describing that most people were missing the big picture about the company, that it was all the "metadata" of private information that was the most valuable thing to Facebook by far.  So -- well, one would think that merely changing the name of your parent company to one of the main issues that's pushed some people in Congress to say Facebook should be broken up because it controls too much information for one private company might not be the wisest tactic to take...