马克.扎克伯格10月29日在Facebook上发布创始人信件,展望了元宇宙的未来,表述了facebook公司拥抱元宇宙并致力于成为元宇宙领域No.1的决心。元宇宙,真的来到了吗?它是否最终会导致人类变得像《机器人总动员》中的人一样肥胖慵懒、带着头盔沉溺于虚幻世界、全靠机器人服务维持生命?
FOUNDER’S LETTER, 2021
We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too.
In recent decades, technology has given people the power to connect and express ourselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mostly typed text on websites. When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line.
The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.
The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this.
In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today. We made a film that explores how you might use the metaverse one day.
In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.
Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more — instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.
You’ll move across these experiences on different devices — augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms. This isn’t about spending more time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.
OUR ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY
The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.
Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media apps. We believe the metaverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our energy to helping achieve its potential.
As I wrote in our original founder’s letter: “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
This approach has served us well. We’ve built our business to support very large and long term investments to build better services, and that’s what we plan to do here.
The last five years have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that building products people love isn’t enough.
I’ve gained more appreciation that the internet’s story isn’t straightforward. Every chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks, and disruption of established interests. We’ll need to work together, from the beginning, to bring the best possible version of this future to life.
Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one. So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance. Most of all, we need to help build ecosystems so that more people have a stake in the future and can benefit not just as consumers but as creators.
This period has also been humbling because as big of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it’s like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice for consumers and high fees for developers are stifling innovation and holding back the internet economy.
We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want our services to be accessible to as many people as possible, which means working to make them cost less, not more. Our mobile apps are free. Our ads model is designed to provide businesses the lowest prices. Our commerce tools are available at cost or with modest fees. As a result, billions of people love our services and hundreds of millions of businesses rely on our tools.
That’s the approach we want to bring to helping to build the metaverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or subsidized to make them available to more people. We’ll continue supporting side-loading and streaming from PCs so people have choice, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible so we can maximize the overall creative economy. We’ll need to make sure we don’t lose too much money along the way though.
Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.
WHO WE ARE
As we embark on this next chapter, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.
We’re a company that focuses on connecting people. While most tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we’ve always focused on building technology so people can interact with each other.
Today we’re seen as a social media company. Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It’s an iconic social media brand.
Building social apps will always be important for us, and there’s a lot more to build. But increasingly, it’s not all we do. In our DNA, we build technology to bring people together. The metaverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networking was when we got started.
Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards.
We just announced that we’re making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments: one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms. Our work on the metaverse is not just one of these segments. The metaverse encompasses both the social experiences and future technology. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.
To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.
Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology around people.
But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.
From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.
I used to study Classics, and the word “meta” comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story. Ours is a story that started in a dorm room and grew beyond anything we imagined; into a family of apps that people use to connect with one another, to find their voice, and to start businesses, communities, and movements that have changed the world.
I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things. It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made by all of us.
We have built things that have brought people together in new ways. We’ve learned from struggling with difficult social issues and living under closed platforms. Now it is time to take everything we’ve learned and help build the next chapter.
I’m dedicating our energy to this — more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you’ll join us. The future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.
<<<<—-下面是Edge浏览器翻译成的中文,其中还是有很多明显的错误,懒得改它,仅作参考—->>>>
创始人的信, 2021
我们正进入互联网的下一章,这也是我们公司的下一章。
近几十年来,技术赋予人们更自然地连接和表达自己的力量。当我开始Facebook时,我们大多在网站上输入文本。当我们拿到带摄像头的手机时,互联网变得更加视觉化和移动化。随着连接速度的加快,视频成为分享体验的更丰富方式。我们已经从桌面到网络,从移动到移动;从文本到照片到视频。但这不是终点。
下一个平台将更加身临其境- -体现互联网, 你在体验, 而不仅仅是看它。我们称之为元宇宙,它会触及我们构建的每一个产品。
元宇宙的定义质量将是一种存在感——就像你和另一个人或在别的地方一样。真正与另一个人在一起是社会技术的终极梦想。这就是为什么我们专注于建设这个。
在元宇宙,你几乎可以做任何你能想象到的事情——与朋友和家人聚在一起,工作,学习,玩,购物,创造——以及全新的体验,这些体验并不适合我们今天对电脑或手机的看法。我们制作了一部电影,探索有一天你如何使用元宇宙。
在未来,你将能够立即传送作为全息图在办公室没有通勤,在音乐会与朋友,或在你的父母的客厅赶上。无论你住在哪里,这将开辟更多的机会。您将能够花更多的时间在对您很重要的事情上,减少交通时间,并减少碳足迹。
想想你今天有多少物理的东西, 将来可能只是全息图。您的电视、配备多个显示器的完美工作设置、棋盘游戏等,它们将不是工厂组装的物理东西,而是由世界各地的创作者设计的全息图。
您将在不同的设备上穿越这些体验 – 增强现实眼镜,以保持存在于物理世界中,虚拟现实将完全沉浸其中,手机和计算机将从现有平台跳入。这不是花更多的时间在屏幕上:是让我们已经花得更好的时间。
我们的角色和责任
元宇宙不会由一家公司创建。它将由创作者和开发人员构建,创造新的体验和数字项目,这些体验和数字项目可以互操作,并解锁比当今平台及其政策约束的创意经济更大的创意经济。
我们在此旅程中的角色是加速开发基础技术、社交平台和创意工具,使元宇宙变为现实,并通过我们的社交媒体应用程序编织这些技术。我们相信元宇宙可以比今天存在的任何东西都带来更好的社会体验,我们将把精力投入到帮助实现其潜力上。
正如我在最初创始人的信中写到的:”我们不为赚钱而建立服务:我们赚钱来建立更好的服务。
这种方法对我们很有利。我们建立我们的业务是为了支持非常大和长期的投资,以建立更好的服务,这就是我们计划在这里做的。
过去五年来,我和我们公司在很多方面都感到谦卑。我学到的主要教训之一是,人们喜欢的产品建设是不够的。
我越来越明白,互联网的故事并不简单。每一章都带来了新的声音和新思想,但也带来了新的挑战、风险和既定利益的破坏。我们需要从一开始就共同努力,使这个未来的最佳版本成为现实。
隐私和安全需要从第一天起就内置到元宇宙中。开放标准和互操作性也是如此。这不仅需要新的技术工作, 如支持社区的加密和 Nft 项目, 还需要新的治理形式。最重要的是,我们需要帮助建立生态系统,使更多的人在未来有利害关系,不仅作为消费者,而且作为创造者能够受益。
这一时期也一直令人谦卑,因为我们是一个庞大的公司,因为我们也学会了在其他平台上建立什么样的。生活在他们的规则下深刻地塑造了我对科技产业的看法。我开始相信,消费者缺乏选择和开发商的高收费正在扼杀创新,阻碍互联网经济。
我们试图采取不同的方法。我们希望我们的服务能够让尽可能多的人获得,这意味着努力降低服务成本,而不是增加成本。我们的移动应用程序是免费的。我们的广告模式旨在为企业提供最低价格。我们的商业工具是有成本的或费用适中。因此,数十亿人热爱我们的服务,数以亿计的企业依赖我们的工具。
这就是我们想要为帮助构建元宇宙而带来的方法。我们计划以成本或补贴出售我们的设备,以便向更多的人提供。我们将继续支持从 PC 侧加载和流式处理,以便人们有选择,而不是强迫他们使用 Quest Store 查找应用程序或联系客户。我们将致力于在尽可能多的情况下以低廉的费用为开发人员和创作者提供服务,以便我们能够最大限度地提高整体创意经济。不过, 我们需要确保我们不会失去太多的钱。
我们希望,在未来十年内,元宇宙将覆盖10亿人,承载数千亿美元的数字商务,并为数百万创作者和开发者提供就业机会。
我们是谁
当我们开始下一章时,我想了很多关于这对我们的公司和我们的身份意味着什么。
我们是一家专注于连接人们的公司。虽然大多数科技公司都关注人们如何与技术互动,但我们始终专注于构建技术,以便人们能够相互互动。
今天,我们被视为一家社交媒体公司。Facebook 是世界上最常用的技术产品之一。这是一个标志性的社交媒体品牌。
构建社交应用对我们来说总是重要的,还有很多东西需要构建。但越来越多的,这不是我们所做的一切。在我们的DNA中,我们构建技术来将人们聚集在一起。元宇宙是连接人们的下一个前沿,就像我们开始建立社交网络时一样。
现在,我们的品牌与一种产品紧密相连,不可能代表我们今天所做的一切,更不用说将来了。随着时间的推移,我希望我们被视为一个元宇宙公司,我想把我们的工作和我们的身份建立在我们建设的方向上。
我们刚刚宣布,我们正在对我们的公司进行根本性的改变。我们现在将我们的业务视为两个不同的细分市场:一个用于我们的应用程序系列,一个用于我们未来平台上的工作。我们在元宇宙方面的工作不仅仅是其中的一个部分。元宇宙包括社会经验和未来的技术。随着我们视野的拓宽,是时候采用新品牌了。
为了反映我们是谁和我们希望建立的未来,我很自豪地分享,我们的公司现在是元。
我们的使命保持不变-它仍然是把人们聚集在一起。我们的应用程序及其品牌也不会改变。我们仍然是一家围绕人设计技术的公司。
但是,我们所有的产品,包括我们的应用程序,现在都有着共同的新愿景:帮助让元宇宙变为现实。现在我们有一个名字,反映了我们所做的事情的广度。
从现在开始,我们将是元宇宙第一,而不是脸谱第一。这意味着随着时间的推移,您将不需要 Facebook 帐户来使用我们的其他服务。随着我们的新品牌开始出现在我们的产品中,我希望世界各地的人们开始了解元品牌和我们所代表的未来。
我过去常学经典,而”元”一词来自希腊语单词,意思是”超越”。对我来说,它象征着总是有更多的建设,总是有下一章的故事。我们的故事,开始于宿舍,成长超过我们想象的任何东西:进入一个应用程序家庭,人们用来相互连接,找到他们的声音,并开始业务,社区和运动,改变了世界。
我为我们迄今所建立的一切感到骄傲,也为接下来的事情感到兴奋——当我们超越今天可能实现的,超越屏幕的限制,超越距离和物理的极限,走向一个人人可以互相在场、创造新机会和体验新事物的未来。这是一个超越任何一家公司的未来,也是我们所有人共同开创的未来。
我们建造了以新的方式把人们聚集在一起的东西。我们从与困难的社会问题作斗争和生活在封闭的平台下中吸取了教训。现在是时候拿走我们学到的一切,帮助建立下一章了。
我为此投入精力,比世界上任何其他公司都多。如果这是你希望看到的未来,我希望你加入我们。未来将超出我们所能想象的一切。