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Comment by rhplus | Hacker News Reader

Something like "The Meta Company" seems like the most likely bet here. Zuckerberg already owns meta.org through the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, and meta.com was updated yesterday to redirect to that same site.

https://who.is/whois/meta.com - updated yesterday

https://who.is/whois/meta.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_(academic_company)

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Definitely has potential. Whatever it is, I'm very certain it will be a short, common dictionary word, that will poison its general meaning forever, like how Tesla is not Nikola anymore.

Oh God, please let it be "VI" or "Tab".

Emacs and Spaces FTW!

I seriously doubt it will poison the word. When you hear the word alphabet, do you think of Google? These companies are too deeply ingrained in the public consciousness to meaningfully change their name. It's a legal thing, nothing more.

Thankfully, context clues let us sort these things out in the vast majority of cases, but there is some small cognitive load there. I do think alphabet being called that poisons the word, in that it creates opportunity for ambiguity. It's another wrinkle in an already messy language that's mutating and forking on multiple fronts. No cap, I'm finna stop alphabet-wannabes yoinkin muh words, it's annoying.

hijacking the cultural cache of the phrase "that's so meta" - deviously clever and annoying

The interesting thing with that is “facebook” comes across as simple and human-like, despite there being a lot of complexity behind it.

Meta is the opposite of this. It sounds robotic, abstract and lacks an emotive trigger. While this is more fitting for the company, it drops the perception-curtain that “facebook” hides behind.

Seems a lot like the creation of Alphabet. Nothing says faceless conglomerate like deliberately naming your company Alphabet.

My reaction to Alphabet was, "If you wanted to look like supervillains who planned to own everything in the world from A to Z... that would be how you'd do it. Was that intentional? I don't understand what else they might have intended."

I didn't have that initial reaction, I thought alphabet, because their company Google, needs to dissect a lot of language, the basic building blocks of which is the alphabet.

> If you wanted to look like supervillains who planned to own everything in the world from A to Z

That would be Amazon, I mean their logo literally has an arrow going from a to z.

That's not an arrow. Bezos has a penis infatuation.

Once i point it out, people can’t look at the logo the same again.

It’s an erect penis, ya’ll.

Reminds me of the classic http://bash.org/?670375

Funny... every single time I looked at the arrow , I thought it as the smile of a faceless creature.

The name is a double entendre. It also refers to making an "alpha" bet.

No they're referring to their mountaineering tendencies, their "Alp habet".

As this reorg was Ruth’s Noogler project, she came from the investment banking world where seeking alpha is the name of the game…so making bets to yield alpha is pretty much what the company does.

Not sure why you are downvoted, this is straight out of Larry Page’s letter to the public about the restructuring.

> We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.

https://abc.xyz/

Completely off-topic, but in the face of all this corporatism, I still love the fact that the period at the end of the sentence, "Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort." is a link to http://hooli.xyz

You know I had the domain metafirm.co and someone purchased it from me on the Sedo marketplace after a year of being on the market on Monday. Wondering if you are right.

I had a meta****.com domain for sale on sedo for couple years, it was sold last week.

Meta domains have been blowing up. meta.so just sold for $149,000

https://domaininvesting.com/meta-so-sold-for-149000/

Imagine the "metastasis" comments, though.

We are a brand new company now, and want to help the people affected by our former ultra-addictive products so we are proud of introducing you our new and improved social net for women: Meta-donna

Man, that's one dystopian name. I'd expect that in some post-apocalyptic tv show.

It's also the most startup name ever. A single, short word from the dictionnairy.

Holy shit: https://about.facebook.com/meta/

Apple bought Meta.io (German AR company) a couple of years ago an may hold some naming rights, getting the brand name could be tough.

After Amazon and Alphabet, my money is on Aardvark.

And, earlier, Atari, Activision, Accolade, Acclaim, and Absolute Entertainment (https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Licensed_Game... ); and the Russian accounting software juggernaut 1C... It’s an old tradition, somewhat forgotten after the decline of phonebooks.

Oh so it's just like when they had internet.org with their dishonest Free Basics program; a URL that would imply something not belonging to a company so naturally the company buys it to raise importance/awareness of itself

I hope not. I am so tired of that word. It's one of the most overused words in tech, almost to the point of losing its meaning.

Wasn't that the name of Steve Mann's AR company?

> Meta

That name seems to remind me of Reddit for some reason.

R/highqualitygifs always references meta

But why it would be .org? Isn't .org usually non-profits but Facebook Inc. is all about profit.

Someone has pointed meta.com to meta.org

If the larger company name is "The Meta Org" or "Meta Organization" or such, then .org would grammatically fit well with the name.

The tld splitup of ".com is commercial, .org is non-profits, .co.uk is british websites, .io is indian ocean websites" is pretty much out the window. Only a subset of those still are used consistently, such as ".gov is government-affiliated" and a few ccTLDs like ".cn", ".jp", and ".co.uk" being pretty consistent. Some of them have enforced restrictions (like some european ccTLDs require you to have an address in the country), but many of them don't.

.com, .net, and .org are the wild west and might as well mean nothing.

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