Last year, Facebook Inc. re-christened itself as Meta Platforms Inc. in pursuit of the metaverse Holy Grail.
On Tuesday, Meta
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Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told employees, who have been colloquially known as “Facebookers,” that they will now be known as “Metamates.”
“Meta, Metamates, Me is about being good stewards of our company and mission,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook profile, which reportedly followed an all-hands meeting detailing the company’s new direction. “It’s about the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates. It’s about taking care of our company and each other,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Underlining the new worker designation, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, soon to become Meta’s chief technology officer, explained the philosophy to The Verge’s Alex Heath in a tweet:
Hofstadter is a world-renowned American author and cognitive scientist.
Of course, Meta isn’t the only tech company to refer to its employees by cute turn-of-phrases. There are “Googlers” at Google parent Alphabet Inc.
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and “Microsofties” at Microsoft Corp.
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The point of the post and the reported meeting with employees was not solely to emphasize a new nickname for the workers, though. Zuckerberg also detailed new “company values” after the name change, such as changing “Be Open” to “Be Direct and Respect your Colleagues.”
“At the end of last year, we put a flag in the ground with Meta as our new name and vision for the future,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook profile. “As we head into this next chapter and continue to grow, I think it’s important to be intentional about how we work and what values we emphasize.”
Meta seems to be into changing a lot of things lately, also shortening the name of its News Feed to just Feed on Tuesday.
“This is just a name change to better reflect the diverse content people see on their Feeds,” a company spokesperson said in an email to MarketWatch after Meta announced the name change on Twitter Inc.’s
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service. “This is just a name change and does not impact the app experience more broadly.”
The continuing rebranding of the company formerly known as Facebook comes as it attempts to re-pivot its business while grappling with mobile privacy changes by rival Apple Inc.
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that have cut into Facebook’s advertising sales and a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission to force the divestiture of properties Instagram and WhatsApp. On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Meta over Facebook’s facial-recognition practices.
This post was originally published on Market Watch
