Facebook is rebranding as Meta

Facebook's new corporate name is Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday, in an apparent effort to recast the company's public image from battered social network to tech innovator focused on building the next generation of online interaction, known as the "metaverse." Facebook has announced this at its annual Connect conference.

 “We’ve learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we’ve learned and help build the next chapter,” Zuckerberg said during an annual developers conference.

The Facebook app used by almost 3 billion people around the world every month will keep its name. But speaking at the company's Connect virtual reality conference, Zuckerberg said it's time to overhaul the corporation's identity to reflect its broader ambitions.

“Our apps and their brands, they are not changing.” Zuckerberg said.

"It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do," he said. "From now on, we're going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first."

He says the metaverse is the next big computing platform to which people's attention — and dollars — will shift in the coming years. And he wants the newly christened Meta to play a prime role in creating it and turning it into big business.

"Building our social media apps will always be an important focus for us. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future," Zuckerberg said.