Talk of creating a metaverse has been going on for a long time and tech giants are ploughing billions into it. However, no one seems to be going as hard as Facebook and their Horizon Worlds concept.
The idea is to create a kind of new internet where we can walk around in a virtual world and do things together. The idea, as previously stated, is not new in any way. One of the more successful concepts is Second Life, which still has failed to get a major user base, and the big problem with the metaverse idea is the question "why?".
Neither we nor the companies have a good answer to this and when Mark Zuckerberg himself tried to impress us with a Facebook post showcasing Horizon Worlds in August, it was actually hard to keep us from laughing, as it mostly looked like an old Wii game (that's us being nice!). Now it turns out, via leaks to The Verge, that even the employees at Facebook doesn't like their metaverse, and therefore don't use it. A manager of the project writes in a memo to employees:
"For many of us, we don't spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly. Why is that? Why don't we love the product we've built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don't love it, how can we expect our users to love it?"
This was later followed up by another memo some time later, in which the same manager apparently noted that the call for employees to use the service they actually work on was not heeded:
"Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can't do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community."
How do you feel about this yourself, how keen are you on Facebook's Horizon Worlds service and the metaverse in general?