Meta products and services include Facebook, Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal. In October 2021, media outlets reported that the parent company of Facebook planned to change its name to “reflect its focus on building the metaverse”. According to Meta the “metaverse” refers to the integrated environment that links all of the company’s products and services. It was rebranded as Meta later that month on October 28.
The company’s milestones:
February 2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.
June 2004: Facebook moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California.
September 2004: Facebook introduces the Wall, which allows people to write personal musings and other tidbits on profile pages.
September 2005: Facebook expands to include high schools.
May 2006: Facebook introduces additional networks, allowing people with corporate email addresses to join.
September 2006: Facebook begins letting anyone over 13 join. It also introduces News Feed, which collects friends’ Wall posts in one place.
November 2007: Facebook unveils its Beacon program, a feature that broadcasts people’s activities on dozens of outside sites. Yet another privacy backlash leads Facebook to give people more control over Beacon, before the company ultimately scraps it as part of a legal settlement.
April 2008: Facebook introduces Chat.
February 2009: Facebook introduces Like, allowing people to endorse other people’s posts.
June 2009: Facebook surpasses News Corp.’s Myspace as the leading online social network in the U.S.
August 2010: Facebook launches location feature, allowing people to share where they are with their friends.
September 2011: Facebook introduces Timeline, a new version of the profile page. It’s meant to show highlights from a person’s entire life rather than recent posts.
February 2012: Facebook files for an initial public offering of stock. A few weeks later, it unveils new advertising opportunities for brands, allowing ads to mix in with Facebook status updates and photos.
April 2012: Facebook announces plans to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, for $1 billion in cash and stock.
October 2012: Facebook says it has 1 billion active users.
December 2012: Facebook rolls out a messaging app called Poke to lukewarm reviews.
January 2013: Facebook unveils a search feature that lets users quickly sift through their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places.
January 2014: Facebook starts to roll out “trending topics,” showing users the most popular topics at any given moment.
On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from “Move fast and break things” to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”.
In 2015, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in stock and cash, which released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016
In May 2019, Facebook founded Libra Networks, reportedly to develop their own stable coin cryptocurrency.
In October 2021, media outlets reported that the parent company of Facebook planned to change its name to “reflect its focus on building the metaverse”.
On October 28, 2022, The company was officially rebranded as Meta.
According to en.wikipedia; phys.org.
