Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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I was curious what meta.com looked like before FB took control of the domain. Recent snapshots aren't loading for me, but post-2015 it looks like it was taken over by an AI company — the page titles include "Meta — Science Discovered" [0] and "Meta — AI for Science".

Prior to that, since around 2012 it was an unused Wordpress site [1] that redirected to meta.compgu.com (which is now "tekman.cc", a consulting firm or something.

And its earliest owner (at least as captured by wayback) was a California events company "Meta Productions: Producers of Meet, Mix and Match. Promoting awareness through metamorphosis" [2]

edit: out of curiosity, I just noticed that one of the most famous domains that refused to sell out [3] — steam.com — is now apparently for sale?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160110141037/http://meta.com/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150228180854/http://meta.compg...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20081002050002/http://www.meta.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20100425061122/http://meta.com/

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023041828/http://steam.com/

There was an actual AR glasses company named Meta before this. They failed a few years ago. I guess Facebook must have bought the trademark from them. But they never owned meta.com I guess. Their current site is https://www.metavision.com/

Many of my friends from Meta (the AR guys) went to Oculus. Zuck acquired Meta.com (the AI guys) like half a decade ago.

The trademark was only for “Meta” in this stylized font: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86907005&caseType=SERIAL_...

Before now, https://meta.com redirected to https://www.meta.org/ which is owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; now, there's a banner saying it will be sunset next March.

It's impressive how the logo on meta.com is not an SVG but a low resolution PNG

Zuck's non-profit acquired the company back in 2017 and as of a few hours ago they conveniently killed it.

Imagine acquiring a company via your non-profit purely to grab the name and domain names for your for-profit.

Announcement: https://cziscience.medium.com/meta-transition-5f66b1fae475

Meta owned meta.com, the m+infinity logo trademark (https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=5548122&caseSearchType=US...), the Meta trademark (https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86852664&caseSearchType=U...).

These trademarks covered: “promoting the goods and services of others via computer and communication networks using targeted and non-targeted methods; operating on-line marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services … providing advertising space via the global computer network … creating on-line virtual communities … hosting electronic facilities for others for organizing and conducting meetings, events and interactive discussions via communication networks”

So pretty likely to conflict with Facebook.

However, they transferred all of these to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in May: https://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/assignment-tm-7299..., and as you mentioned, are now shutting down. It’s not a great look. I would feel pretty bad if I had devoted years of my life to building meta.org to now see how it was used

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