The Meta metaverse is shrinking
An interesting article in the Financial Times, “Whatever happened to the metaverse?”, reflects waning interest in parallel with Facebook’s name change to Meta in a bid to associate itself irrevocably with the concept — illustrated by its ad during the Super Bowl halftime. Sadly for Mark Zuckerberg, the public’s imagination doesn’t seem to have been captivated by immersive virtual worlds, and aside from a few specialized fields like education, it’s hard to see much of a future for these kinds of platforms.
The Google Trends graph shown here, reflects the interest generated by the term metaverse since it reached its peak in mid-2021 until now. In short, the world seems much more interested in other trends such as machine learning.
What happened? Facebook’s multi-billion dollar reinvention as Meta has not proved to be a strategic or visionary inspiration: it was simply an attempt, after the company’s reputation was beyond salvaging, to create a platform of its own on which it could set the rules. Facebook (its name at the time) may not have been kicked off of the app stores, but its wings were clipped so that it could no longer spy on everything users of its apps did on their devices. From then on, the company’s share price value collapsed to the point that it had the worst one-day loss of value in the history of the stock market, $232 billion, and has yet to…
