Why Facebook Will Fail at the Metaverse

Might get a lot of hate for this, but here goes: Facebook, or Meta as the company now calls itself, is a metaverse failure waiting to happen.

Hear me out before unleashing the hate…

Facebook came of age amid Web 2.0 — the web we still largely live within. And it did well for itself. Today, FB has 2.91 billion, active monthly users, as of the third quarter of 2021. Basically, three of every eight people on the planet interact with Facebook monthly — a mind-boggling statistic.

But Facebook’s pending problem as a metaverse company was laid bare in early October when the company’s operations crashed. FB alerted its users with a perfunctory message: “Some people are having trouble accessing their Facebook app.”

Yes — “some” people.

Nearly half the freakin’ planet.

That highlights why Facebook is destined for doom as a metaverse play: Its centralized operations.

It’s a Web 2.0 success story now aiming to star as a Web 3.0 belle of the metaverse. Alas, watching Facebook try to make a go of that will be like watching your octogenarian grandmother pop up at Ultra Music Fest and try to square dance to deadmau5. People are gonna stop and watch because it’s just so cringe.

But ultimately everyone is going to move on and leave granny behind.

To understand why, let me recap the history of the internet in two paragraphs…

We first had Web 1.0 — the very first iteration of the internet. It was a “read-only” internet, and its primary use was (sarcastically) plagiarizing other people’s work and passing it off as your own in school assignments.

Then came Web 2.0 — the “read-write” version we’ve all interacted with for 20-plus years. We buy, sell, invest, and chat in Web 2.0. We contribute to Web 2.0 through blogs, YouTube, TikTok, and other such apps. We post “check-ins” on Facebook from the Five Guys burger joint on Corporate Boulevard in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, thinking people actually care that we just had lunch on a random Wednesday.

There — history of the internet done up `til now, we move on to tomorrow: Web 3.0