Since Facebook's splashy keynote event last month, Benedict Evans has heard one word over and over again.

Metaverse.

I referred to the under scene in Being John Malkovich, where everyone in the room is John Malkovich,

and everyone just says Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, which it does feel a little bit like that.

Evans has been in the tech world for a while, and used to work for venture capital company.

Now he's an independent analyst, and he keeps an eye on the next big things coming in tech.

For the last 15 years, that was smartphones, smartphones were the center of the tech industry

before that it was so web, before that it was PCs, and smartphones are kind of boring now they

had, and everyone's got one. So what's next?

For Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that next big thing is the Metaverse.

At that keynote event, he proclaimed it the next chapter of the internet. So central to his company,

it rebranded itself, Meta.

Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology and deliver an

experience where we are present with each other.

In an occasionally hokey video presentation, he painted a picture of a world where you could put

on a virtual reality headset or augmented reality classes, and jump seamlessly between business

meetings, card games with friends, and workout classes. And Meta, he said, was going to help create

this universe. I am dedicating our energy to this more than any other company in the world.

Benedict Evans says that this is tricky. It's hard to pin down what the Metaverse is.

Imagine we were in the early 90s and we said it feels like these computer things,

these PCs are going to be a big consumer trend. What would that mean?

You might start writing concepts on a whiteboard. Multimedia, graphical user interfaces,

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