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Posts tagged as “Mark Zuckerberg”

Meta launches Threads, a twitter clone powered by Instagram

It’s finally here, Meta has officially launched Threads, the company’s version of twitter and will compete not only with twitter but with Bluesky, another twitter rival backed by Jack Dorsey, who is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter.

Threads will use your Instagram account for login and will support posting up to 500-character text, photos, and up to 5 minutes videos. Threads is available on iOS and Android in 100 countries, except in EU, since the company needs to iron out the local data privacy regulations.

To signup for Threads, users must have an Instagram account, where their username and verification status will carry over. Threads users can then customized their profile independently.

Under the hood, while it is currently using Instagram infrastructure, Threads will soon offer support for ActivityPub — the same decentralized social networking protocol used by Mastodon and other federated apps. Once ActivityPub takes effect, Threads will be able to widen its reach, as Mastodon’s ecosystem engages 1.7 million active users.

Meta timed the launched of Threads, specially now that Twitter have imposed a number of restrictions including rate-limit and limiting access of twitter account on TweetDeck to verified users only.

This is not the first time that Meta/Facebook tried to copy twitter, in the early days of Facebook, the company took inspiration from twitter the hashtag, verified accounts, Vine, followers and real-time conversation, among others. It’s still too early to know if Threads will be successful in taking the air out of twitter’s space but if the Elon-led twitter continue to implode, Thread may become the twitter replacement.

Mark Zuckerberg introduces Meta Quest 3 Headset with a starting price of $499

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has officially announce the Meta Quest 3, a standalone mixed and virtual reality headset powered by Qualcomm chipset and claim to be 2x faster and 10x more pixels in Passthrough than the Quest 2. Mark made the announcement 5 days before Apple’s WWDC, where they are expected to announce their own AR-VR headset.

Image: Insides of the Meta Quest 3.

“Ultimately, our vision is to enable you to move through all realities in a way that’s intuitive and delightful,” says Mark Rabkin, VP of VR, “going beyond the rigid classifications of ‘virtual reality’ and ‘mixed reality’ to deliver truly next-gen experiences that let you effortlessly blend the physical and virtual worlds. Meta Reality gives you both the deep, immersive magic of VR and the freedom and delight of making your physical world more fun and useful with MR. We’re excited to see what developers and creators can build on the Quest Platform when the possibilities are limitless.”

Image: Meta Quest 3’s Touch Plus controllers with TruTouch haptics

The Meta Quest 3 will have a 40% slimmer profile, and its Touch Plus controllers was redesigned ditching the outer tracking rings for a more comfort, it also features TruTouch haptics that was introduced first in the company’s Quest Pro. The 128GB model of the Quest 3 headset starts at $499.99 USD, and the company will provide more details at the company’ Connect conference on September 27.

Facebook renames its corporate brand to Meta

In a video posted on his official Facebook account, Mark Zuckerberg officially announced that the Facebook will change its corporate name to Meta. Meta will now be the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. Zuckerberg’s announcement was made on the first day of the company’s annual Connect conference.

Here’s a video where Mark Zuckerberg introduce the company’s new name.

The new name will not affect any of Meta’s products or services, since this is more of a corporate restructuring similar to what Google made in 2015 when they changed its corporate name from Google to Alphabet, even though we still associate all of its company and subsidiary to “Google.”

Mark further explained what their vision for metaverse in a 1 hour video;

The change in Facebook’s corporate name was first reported by Alex Heath of The Verge. You can already read Meta’s official statement here.