Little over a year ago, on the 28th of October, 2021, social media giant, Facebook, rebranded itself into Meta. The announcement was made at the Facebook Connect conference. The rebranding reflected the company’s attempt at growing beyond social media, delving into web3.
Regardless of the fall in Meta stock prices, the firm has sure been busy in the year since the rebrand.
What Meta achieved
Meta’s ambitions are high. And the same reflects in the projects that the company has undertaken.
In December 2021, the company unveiled its virtual reality social networking project called Horizon Worlds. Additionally, it made more cryptocurrency ads on Facebook possible.
Fast forward to April 2022, there were reports about the company designing a digital currency to be used within the metaverse. However, there is no official update on this matter.
The company submitted five trademark applications in May for Meta Pay, a platform for processing payments that supports crypto and other digital assets. Moreover, in September the firm announced that users in 100 countries would be able to post their NFTs on Facebook and Instagram.
Meanwhile, on October 11th, tech giant Microsoft and Meta announced a collaboration to integrate a number of Microsoft Office 365 products into Meta’s virtual reality (VR) platform.
What the company did not achieve
Although the company has made progress on many of its endeavours, there are some fronts where it did not.
The CEO and founder of Altimeter Capital described Meta’s $10 to $15 billion annual investment in the metaverse as “super-sized and terrifying” last week.
The stock price dropped 23.6% after the release of Meta’s Q3 report, and Reality Labs, Meta’s division for virtual reality research and development, reported an overall loss of $9.44 billion so far this year. Furthermore, the company has received backlash for the lacklustre visuals in the metaverse.
The company has reportedly cut its monthly active user goal for Horizon Worlds by more than half, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The report claimed that the company’s flagship Metaverse was “falling short.” During the Q3 earnings call on October 26, Zuckerberg mentioned this backlash and said “we’re iterating out in the open” and that the social metaverse platform was still in its “early version.”
However, the tech giant is still making progress with its move into Web3 and other initiatives, such as artificial intelligence
At press time, Meta stock was trading at $99.20, up by 1.29%.