Facebook since its inception has honestly been a controversial thing. Not the least
of which was that because of it the social media boom really took off, and questions
about what people do on social media, and what is shown on social media, began. But
then the conversation turned to what Facebook was doing on its own service, and things got
pretty heated. To the extent that a major news story broke about things going on behind
the scenes and Facebook's creator needed to pivot, and pivot hard. So allow us to show
you Facebook and the Metaverse What You Need to Know!
6. The Reveal Under siege on multiple fronts, Mark Zuckerberg
has pinned his trillion-dollar company’s future to creating a metaverse, last week
renaming Facebook as “Meta.” (For simplicity, we’ll continue to refer to Zuck’s company
as Facebook in this story.) Zuckerberg has said the concept will cost $10 billion this
year–then more in future years—and expects the metaverse to lose money for the foreseeable
future. The numbers are big, but Facebook can stomach those losses just fine: It netted
$29.1 billion in profits on $86 billion in sales last year.
Zuckerberg’s project isn’t earth shatteringly new. Fragments of it have kicked around Silicon
Valley for years—as Second Life and Bezos’ interest in the metaverse make clear. But
Facebook does have a couple things going for it that others in the past didn’t. One is
the ability to deploy more money in the next two or three years than the total of all the
dollars spent on the metaverse during the prior 30 years. Another is the simple fact
that we’re all a great deal more comfortable with virtual communication now after working
from home for much of the past 20 months. “Our goal is to help the metaverse reach
a billion people and billions of dollars in commerce in the next decade,” Zuckerberg
said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week. Getting there, he noted,
“will be a long road.” But again, that raises a major question...
5. What Is The Metaverse? In short, it is " A boundless, 3D digital
world accessed as easily as the internet, where we do things like hang out in a park,
play a game, see a concert or suffer through a work conference."
So you know, things like we did in Second Life, just with better graphics and interaction.
If you're curious about the origins of this concept, we need to go back in time a little
bit. A computer scientist named Jaron Lanier first
coined the term “virtual reality” in the 80s, and the first applications for VR were
airlines, car makers, NASA and the military. They were the only ones who could afford the
technology. Back then, a VR headset might cost as much as $3 million in current dollars,
Lanier estimates. “It was expensive and hard to come up with a business model to make
enough money from an arcade situation,” he says.
The actual term “metaverse” comes from a best-selling 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash.
Its author, Neal Stephenson, imagined a dystopian world where the book’s main character, a
hacker/pizza delivery guy named Hiro Protagonist, travels back and forth from his grim reality
to a 3D virtual cityscape, the Metaverse, that stretches for over 40,000 miles. Stephenson’s
work would later influence The Matrix series and Ready Player One, a 2018 Steven Spielberg
film based on a book by Ernest Cline from seven years earlier.
4. Attempts At A Metaverse Aside from Second Life, the most realized
examples of metaverses have come from video games. The most famous example of these online,
persistent game worlds is World of Warcraft, which has been going strong now for 17 years
and still has about 5 million paying subscribers. The place is a sword-and-sorcery geekdom with
an undeniably large social component: People have met their spouses playing the game. It’s
also a financial juggernaut. Activision Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, has
earned well over $8 billion in lifetime revenue from the game.
Snap has delved deeply into the space, too, but has focused its efforts on augmented reality,
a slightly different concept than VR. Augmented reality revolves around using your smart phone
or special eyeglasses to augment the real world with virtual elements. Niantic’s Pokémon
Go game is the best-known use of AR. The key difference is AR doesn’t fully block out
reality; a VR headset strapped over your head does. Microsoft has jumped into the fray,
too, announcing just a day ago that it would develop a work-focused metaverse—where its
Teams collaboration software would have VR and digital avatars.
Epic Games’ Fortnite, which debuted in 2017, has probably come closer to a Snow Crash-type
metaverse than anything else. Fortnite players see its online battle royale game as a place
to socialize; they chat through audio and video features built into desktop computers
and gaming consoles or through third-party apps, like Discord. And virtual concerts from
artists such as Marshmello, Travis Scott and Arianna Grande have further widened its universe.
3. The Zuckerburg Metaverse Zuckerberg seems to hope people will access
his virtual world through a VR headset—just as Hiro did in Snow Crash. It is an important
distinction. Fortnite, Second Life and most other multiplayer online games are typically
displayed on a PC monitor or TV connected to gaming consoles like an Xbox or a PlayStation.
The rest of Zuckerberg’s metaverse idea seems very much a work in progress. But he
has shared images of a VR office setting called Horizon, which would take advantage of the
pandemic’s shift to virtual work. Zuckerberg began laying the groundwork for
this back in 2014 when he purchased Palmer Luckey’s Oculus, a VR headset maker, for
$2 billion. Facebook has since acquired more than a half dozen other VR-focused startups—including
last week’s purchase of Within, a Los Angeles-based boutique game developer—committing over
$1 billion to the on-going shopping spree. Shortly after Facebook released its first
Oculus headset in 2016, Vanity Fair asked Stephenson what he thought about the prospect
of Facebook moving into virtual reality. “There’s no fixed process for predicting the results
and controlling what happens,” said Stephenson, who couldn’t be reached for this story.
“At some level, it boils down to people’s capacity to act as socially responsible, ethical
individuals.” 2. Why Go This Path?
Facebook, which wouldn’t comment for this story, has lost ground among younger users
to YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat. While Instagram remains popular with teens, Facebook’s original
app isn’t. Increased attention around anti-trust issues means Facebook likely can’t buy any
new competitors. If it wants an app to win back young people, it will need to build it
itself, and Zuckerberg seems to feel a VR-centered metaverse will do this. Moreover, talking
about the metaverse provides a timely distraction from a whistle-blower scandal consuming much
of the media attention around Facebook. If you didn't hear that story, a whistleblower
came forward and revealed that it would be VERY easy for Facebook to get rid of certain
kinds of ads and bots that have been flooding Facebook timelines for a long time now. The
reason they don't? Profit. They get profit from every ad clicked, regardless if they're
real news, fake news, or something in between. Facebook doesn't want to lose revenue so they
don't fix their product. Hence why "Meta" and the "Metaverse" were
revealed not long after this message, a simple sleight of hand to try and get people talking
about it, and not about Facebook. 1. Facebook's Future
As for what happens with Facebook right now, that's a good question. Not long after that
whistleblower piece blew up via 60 Minutes, Facebook "shut down" for a period of time
and many people believed it was to hide certain things that couldn't be used against them
in the long run. There's no doubt that Facebook is going to
endure, but especially now with the very odd and very clear "deflector" that is Metaverse,
Facebook is going to be on pins and needles as they try and figure out what to do next.
Obviously their ads and other ways they make profit are going to be the biggest things
under scrutiny, so perhaps they'll retract things for a bit to make it LOOK like they're
doing the "right thing", but then they'll go back full force later on.
It all depends on what Mark Zuckerberg wants to do, and he's made it clear over the years
that what he cares about most is making money and being successful. Whether he can do that
with Metaverse is obviously something to debate, but as long as finds ways to keep making money
off Facebook (which he knows how to do in various underhanded ways), he'll do whatever
he wants whenever he wants...no matter what anyone says.
So what do you think? What do you think of this look at Facebook and what Zuckerburg
is trying to do with The Metaverse? Do you think that he'll be able to divert enough
attention away from his main platform so he can't be investigated for potential crimes?
Or will this just draw even more attention to himself and what he's doing? Let us know
in the comments below and we'll see you next time on
the channel!