Serendipity35

You've heard that Facebook is changing its name to Meta. Facebook, Inc. is now Meta Platforms, Inc. or Meta to be brief. Search "meta" on Facebook and you find about.facebook.com/meta  (meta.com will also take you there.)

People on the perimeter seem to think that this rebranding is an attempt to turn attention from all the negative press that Facebook and Instagram have been getting the past few months. This is more like when Google became Alphabet. Google still exists and people still say Google when they mean the umbrella company (Alphabet) and I'm sure it will take a long time before Facebook is thought of as being Meta.

I posted on Twitter a few weeks ago when people were guessing about the new name that I thought "Metaverse" would be the new name. It made sense since Zuckerberg has been talking about playing a big role in the future metaverse. Of course, almost no one knows what the metaverse is or will be. I wrote about it here and I still find it difficult to explain to someone this "future of the Internet."

I also suspect that, like Google/Alphabet, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg may drop the CEO role at Facebook and move over to Meta. He made the name change "official" at the company’s developer conference Connect. He hopes that Meta will reach a billion people in the next 10 years. That sounds conservative if you consider that Facebook is at two billion already. Add in WhatsApp and Instagram users into one big metaverse and Branding and marketing experts, however, agree that the Facebook name is too deeply entrenched at this point and the company faces an uphill battle to recast in a new and more transparent light.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg said he went with Meta because it’s a Greek word that “symbolizes there’s always more to build.” Meta from the Greek means "after" or "beyond." I think it is more interesting - and perhaps more on target - that it also means an awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category and self-referential.

Is it coincidental that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (the philanthropy Zuckerberg founded with his wife, Priscilla Chan) had acquired a startup called Meta that uses AI to aggregate scientific research? Officially, the project’s website says it’s a separate entity from Facebook.

Meta’s most obvious connotation here is the metaverse itself. So, what will Meta be doing in the immediate future? We have one clue looking at what they are doing with Oculus which they purchased seven years ago. That company builds virtual reality headsets that allow people to play 3D virtual games. It was also announced this week that the Oculus name would be retired and that its hardware and apps will now operate under the Meta brand.

How will Facebook change? It won't for now. Same with Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta is also Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal, along with acquisitions Giphy and Mapillary, and has a stake in Jio Platforms.

Donald Trump was banned from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. His social media accounts were also flagged multiple times for spreading false information about voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. So banished from major social media platforms, the former President has now announced plans to form a public company that will launch a social platform of his own.

This past week a press release announced TRUTH Social would be his space. It is supposed to beta launch in November with a wider rollout in 2022. In the information released publically, Donald Trump is listed as the chairman of the Trump Media & Technology Group. TMTG would be formed by joining with Digital World Acquisition Corp., pending regulatory and stockholder approval. DWAC is a special purpose acquisition company, which sells stock with the intention of buying private firms, and the release says the corporation will invest $293 million in the Trump project.

The day I read about the announcement was the same day that a friend emailed to say that he discovered my old MySpace account was still online. the two things fit together for me.

"My space" is what Trump wants. A place where he can say whatever he wants without someone else controlling what content he puts out. He tried this before. His attempt to start a post-presidential blog didn't last very long. In June 2021, that blog shut down.  after Trump had become frustrated because there was little traffic to the site. It was not a well-designed site and cost only a few thousand dollars to make (by a company run by his former campaign manager set it up). Rather than give Trump a megaphone, it ended up making his voice and influence seem small and less significant.

As soon as this new venture was announced the media started commenting. CNN (no friend of Trump) gave three reasons why the Trump venture will fail: Twitter already exists; the conservative social space is crowded (and not doing well); and Donald Trump isn't President anymore.

A post on engadget.com gave a more serious technical reason for problems with the site - a licensing error. "The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) says The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) violated a licensing agreement when it recently launched a test version of TRUTH Social. The website ran on a modified version of Mastodon, a free and open-source platform for operating Twitter-like social media networks. Anyone can use Mastodon provided they comply with AGPLv3, the software license that governs its code." That would include that you share your source code with all users. At the Trump site's test version launch, it did not do that. TMTG has 30 days to comply with AGPLv3 or face consequences.

I can imagine Trump telling the designers of the new platform that "I want my space online to say whatever I want to say."

On the business side of this, the stock price for DWAC skyrocketed on October 21st after the announcement. I hope the SEC is looking at who bought shares of DWAC in the days before the announcement. And I assume they will carefully note who sells that stock before any announcement that, like Trump's earlier social effort, the whole thing collapses.

The University of Al Qarawiynn appeared 12 centuries ago in what is now Morocco. In 1088, the University of Bologna was founded. It seems that colleges and universities have always been with us and many of us expect them to always be the leading paces for serious education and research, launching careers and changing the world.

But enrollments for undergraduates have been declining in the 21st-century. InsideHigherEd reports that enrollments dropped by 600,000 (3.5 percent) in the past year and they report on the "demise of the baccalaureate degree."

Why? This past year the pandemic certainly had an impact on enrollments but the trend goes back further. Quick answers include the cost, outdated methods and employers who increasingly find less value in the degree.

Both employers and students seem to be wanting shorter credentialing than the traditional four-year (sometimes) baccalaureate, and alternative credentials. 

If higher education hasn't kept pace the past few decades with technological and social change, it's not shocking. "Change from 1821 to 1822, or 1921 to 1922, was likely somewhat less frenetic than we see from 2021 to 2022."  Somewhat is an understatement.

In the article cited above, Ray Schroeder asks if higher education has kept up by changing: courses, prerequisites, general education requirements, curricula, competencies, emphases and anticipating and incorporating social shifts in working and leisure. He thinks it means "teaching for the future rather than the past."

He asks, "Who on your campus is leading the charge to update the curriculum, to cultivate alternative credentials, to promote revised transcripting that will turn the process over to the student as owner with the university becoming one of a whole host of participants offering documented credentials? Will your institution be left behind, charging $100,000 or more for an outdated and less relevant baccalaureate while others will be offering less expensive, more relevant, just-in-time credentials that are valued by both employers and students?"

 

 

You may familiar with the term "ghosting" as it refers to the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication. It is often used in social media contexts.I have written earlier about people ghosting jobs and colleges and also about professional ghosting. This post is about ghosts that may be closer to the supernatural type.

An episode at wsj.com/podcasts on ghosts created using artificial intelligence (AI) are digital personas. The podcast suggests that creating these personas could be a kind of "immortality." Perhaps someday you might have the opportunity to have yourself recreated via AI but there is also the idea of creating people from the past. The podcast asks, "What if Abraham Lincoln could address Congress today? Or if you could have dinner with your deceased ancestors?"

There is interest in doing this from researchers and also from entrepreneurs. Is this an AI-enhanced sophisticated version of something like the hologram of Tupac that performed at Coachella a few years? That is not the ultimate vision for this technology. Researchers are looking to go beyond chatbots and animatronic robots.

It would be done using all the data that a person creates or unconsciously generates: social media posts, emails, texts, voice and video recordings. You have also probably seen examples of actors (alive or dead) being inserted into new films using a combination of previously shot footage and new footage created using existing data and some AI magic.

One startup working on this that was referenced is HereAfter AI. They are not creating "ghosts," holograms, robots or something that looks like your grandfather sitting across from you. What they are doing is taking what data they can get from a life story and using it to make a replica of that person that's embedded in a smart speaker. It means you can have a "conversation" with that person using a smart speaker. Microsoft has patented a conversational chatbot that uses some of the aforementioned data sources. from things, like social media and other things to create a chatbot that could converse and talk in the personality of some specific person.

Of course, this is not the sci-fi AI ghost that you might be imagining. That version is not in the near future. That AI Abe Lincoln is not going to be able to be a great modern-day President. An AI Albert Einstein isn't going to be able to finally come up with a unified field theory. With historical figures, we are often lacking video, audio and certainly social media and we would have to rely on text. Having an AI ghost of me even with all of my digital footprints doesn't feel like immortality to me.

But don't get caught unprepared. Start curating your digital persona now.