Facebook is making plans to rebrand its company, starting with a name change as soon as next week, reports the Verge.
The change is intended to signal the company’s ambition to be known as more than a social media giant.
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, reportedly plans to announce the name change at the company’s annual ‘Connect Conference’ on Thursday, October 28th.
The rebranding would most likely position the Facebook app as one of the many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook reportedly declined to comment for this story.
The Verge reports that in July, Zuckerberg revealed that over the next several years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as universal as smartphones.
Facebook is not the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a parent company called Alphabet, partly to indicate that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech.
Snapchat also rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a “camera company” and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.