Since 2004, Facebook (Meta) has been in the business of user experience.
Harvesting user data to better serve relevant ads
Multiple rewrites of their website to capture and hold your attention
Acquired 93 industry-leading companies to further their product offerings
The company's branding transition to Meta was highly intentional, and a great indicator of where the company sees themselves in the future.
They've been preparing for this shift silently for years.
Haven't seen the hints? Surprisingly, all their big investments have been building towards this goal.
Launching gaming-based & live streaming services
Acquiring Oculus, building a collaborative VR platform
Building the largest buy & sell marketplace on the web
The core Meta suite - posts, stories, groups, messaging
The entire product is a digital ecosystem on steroids, primed for web3 takeover.
Notice how Meta didn't once mention words like crypto, NFT, web3?
This was by design, not coincidence.
Ask the 10 people closest to you about any of these terms. I can guarantee 9/10 would give you a blank stare in response. It would have been a net loss to frame this new digital world they're building using words that nobody understands.
The adoption of these technologies is still in it's infancy, and Meta knows this.
The language used in their presentation was a master class in user empathy.
This isn't Meta's first rodeo.
It's taken them over a decade to adopt and train the userbase they have today. Think about their competition when they first started gaining popularity - MSN, AOL, MySpace. The biggest hurdle for Meta wasn't the technology powering their service. It was the onboarding needed to show people why they should use it.
This is no different with the Metaverse.