Facebook will not “own” the metaverse

With the news out today that Facebook is rebranding it’s corporate entity to Meta, there are some great reads that domain investors should check out.

The most important point is that Facebook will not “own” the metaverse. Even Mark Zuckerberg pointed that out.

Engadget published today:

And for all of his talk of turning Facebook into a metaverse company, he’s adamant that he doesn’t want to build a metaverse that’s entirely owned by Facebook. He doesn’t think other companies will either. Like the mobile web, he thinks every major technology company will contribute something towards the metaverse. He’s just hoping to make Facebook a pioneer.

FastCompany published an article a couple days ago, “What the metaverse will (and won’t) be, according to 28 experts“

It’s a good read and might give investors some new ideas they did not think about. Rony Abovitz from Magic Leap had an interesting take, besides the take he will not call it the Metaverse, but rather calls it Xverse.

Building a world will become something everyone can do (like building a webpage or a blog) and people will be able to share richer parts of their external and inner lives at incredibly high-speed across the planet.

Before the Facebook news surfaced over the last few weeks, Matthew Ball published an excellent series on the Metaverse. It is a long read over multiple parts that for me was very interesting. I would at a minimum bookmark it so you can read when you have time.

From his initial post:

Ultimately, too much of the Metaverse remains unclear for us to have strong convictions on who will lead it or how they’ll get us there. And in truth, it’s most likely the Metaverse emerges from a network of different platforms, bodies, and technologies working together (however reluctantly) and embracing interoperability. The Internet today is a product of a relatively messy process in which the open (mostly academic) internet developed in parallel with closed (mostly consumer-oriented) services that often looked to “rebuild” or “reset” open standards and protocols.

To this end, it’s hard to imagine any of the major technology companies being “pushed out” by the Metaverse and/or lacking a major role. Not only will the Metaverse grow the pie by too much, big transitions tend to disrupt when they’re hard to see and incumbents are slow to respond or capital constrained. None of this is true today (which doesn’t mean market share won’t shift, or that some companies, such as Epic, won’t surge to the forefront).

For a look at the background of Meta related domain name sales, I published this a couple weeks ago.

There are hundreds to some days thousands of Meta related domain names being registered. Take your time, especially if you are new. This is a high risk endeavor, 99.9999% of the best domain names have been registered. Hell Meta has been registered in extensions that have never had a reported domain name sale. Namebio does not even have them in their drop down of hundreds of extensions.

There are 626 live TM’s on the term Meta at the USPTO for further reading.

Author disclosure: I own a handful of meta related domain names with less than $100 invested, basically a year long lottery ticket, I have no other vested interest in metaverse related projects. That could change in the future and I would update this post and in our disclosure policy page.