Is Meta Building the Metaverse?

I made a Medium post previously about the Facebook name change to Meta, and how fundamentally there is no change to the product. I stand by what I said about how making these types of decisions, which have no impact on the actual product, are part of the reason why big tech companies do not make as many technology innovations as they do during the growth phase.

That being said, we’ve all seen the memes for Meta, but the fact that the company is now aiming to build a “metaverse” means that we should take a hard look at Facebook’s products under the definition of what the metaverse is to see if Meta is really building the metaverse.

Mark Zuckerberg relaunched Meta as Skynet. (Jk, jk but secretly not jk.)

When we look at the metaverse in terms of attributes, venture capitalist Matthew Ball assigns 6 characteristics that define it:

1. Persistence/Synchrony
2. Fully functioning economy
3. Unlimited concurrent users
4. Interoperability of digital assets, information, etc.
5. User-generated content
6. Spanning private/public networks, open/closed platforms, etc.

Across all products, Meta has done a fantastic job in terms of scaling in many of these areas: having ~3 billion monthly active users with no significant issues to having many of these users be concurrent users (point #3) and providing UGC content across Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp (point #5). Arguably, Facebook and Instagram are also marketplaces so there is a fully functioning economy where users can connect with others to buy/sell products (point #2) and Facebook and Instagram groups allow you to create open/closed platforms using groups (point #6 — but this is a technicality since groups are still moderated by Facebook for following safety guidelines).

So really, the questions for how Meta is a metaverse platform really is around how they tackle persistence/synchrony and operability of digital assets/information, which I argue are nonexistent on their current platforms today.

When we think of persisting users across the metaverse, this means that their avatars are persistent and synchronized across all platforms. Unfortunately, Meta does not allow you to create virtual avatars outside of a profile photo on Facebook and Instagram, and your identities on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Workplace, etc. are independent, which means that you cannot maintain a cohesive identity throughout Meta’s various platforms.

Lastly, there are issues with transacting digital items and assets through Meta’s platforms. Currently, none of Meta’s products have economies built around digital assets and information about users is currently maintained and utilized by Meta itself. Because of this issue where there is no D2C or B2C business model for information, it makes it difficult for Meta to call itself a true metaverse that is decentralized in nature. (Ads as a framework does not count as a digital marketplace since it is a service for businesses to use.)

Fundamentally, Meta will likely be able to build out a metaverse of its own. With a few acquisitions of companies that create emotion-driven avatars, provide marketplace solutions for digital content (including NFTs), and integrate B2B and B2C economies, Meta can likely be the largest player creating a metaverse framework within the next 10 years. That’s all to say that execution needs to be done correctly and all their platforms need to become fully integrated for consumers in order to become a true metaverse product.