Facebook, the company, has rebranded to Meta. To clean up the widely publicized mess it has created. What is not covered in the media is that Facebook didn’t spend a ton of money on meta.com, the domain name Meta is using for its brand.

Facebook reportedly owns close to 4,000 domain names, many of which are useless but are necessary to prevent cybercrimes such as typosquatting.

Mark Zuckerberg already owned the domain meta.com, as well as the Twitter handle @Meta, following the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s acquisition of an academic data analysis company called Meta in 2017. The company is now defunct as of March 2022.

Following the announcement yesterday, all Facebook did was repurpose meta.com and swap the usernames of the @Facebook and @Meta Twitter accounts. The old @Facebook account is now @Meta. The old @Meta Twitter account is a placeholder for the @Facebook username.

Despite owning Instagram, Meta couldn’t use the @Meta username which is already owned by another Instagram user so they had to settle for @WeAreMeta for now. Facebook also seems to have taken the @Meta Instagram username, which was previously owned by a publishing company. This is not surprising as Instagram is a Meta product.

When Google, the company, was renamed to Alphabet in 2015 they settled with the domain name abc.xyz as alphabet.com was already taken by another entity. Google already owned the .xyz generic TLD so it made sense to stick with the first and last three letters of the alphabet to create a unique and clever domain name.