Today’s a big day for Facebook. At its developer conference in San Francisco, the company revealed the future of the Messenger Platform, its first big play for the Internet of Things, and more.
In case you missed the livestream, here’s a list of everything Facebook’s announced at F8 so far.
1. Facebook officially unveils its Messenger Platform
Facebook officially announced the launch of its Messenger Platform during its F8 developer conference. At its core, the new service enables developers to add Messenger features to other apps.
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“It’s a new platform that developers can use to build apps that help people connect,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the opening F8 keynote.
2. Facebook will soon let users connect directly with businesses
After officially announcing its Messenger Platform, Zuckerberg demonstrated an interesting new feature: Users will be able to place an order with an online retailer, then change the order or shipping details later via Messenger.
3. Facebook will support 360-degree videos soon
Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will “soon” support “spherical” 360-degree videos in its Newsfeed. In addition, Zuck says Facebook will bring these spherical videos to Oculus VR.
4. Parse unveils SDKs for the Internet of Things
Facebook today introduced new software development kits for its Parse mobile app development platform, enabling developers to incorporate data from Internet-connected devices. The news, which first leaked yesterday, came officially today at Facebook’s developer-oriented F8 conference in San Francisco.
5. Facebook has paid out $8B to developers
Facebook over the past five years has given more than $8 billion to developers building on its platform, Zuckerberg said at the company’s F8 conference in San Francisco today. More than 30 million apps have been made using Facebook’s platform, he told the crowd.
6. Facebook announces new mobile app analytics tool
Facebook announced the launch of a new app analytics tool, designed to let mobile developers track the user behavior in apps, as well as ads that promote the apps. The tool is available now, and it’s free, Facebook’s Deborah Liu said.
7. Facebook unveils embeddable videos
Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. This means it’ll be a lot easier for users to share videos elsewhere. Of course, this also offers content creators more incentive for uploading videos, since they have the potential to be shared a little more.
8. No, Facebook did not say the Oculus Rift will arrive this year
During Facebook’s second day F8 keynote today, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer talked a lot about virtual reality, the future, and Oculus VR’s role in both. One statement he made during his monologue was taken out of context to imply that Facebook would launch the Oculus Rift this year. That’s not happening.
9. Facebook Messenger passes 600M monthly active users
Facebook announced a lot at its F8 developer conference today, but the biggest news was naturally the new Facebook Messenger platform. The company also revealed a new milestone: Facebook Messenger now has 600 million monthly active users. That’s the number of users that will be able to quickly use whatever developers build for the platform.
10. Facebook introduces Parse Explorer, a debugging tool
Facebook’s Parse cloud back-end for developing and deploying mobile apps is getting a debugging tool called Parse Explorer. The service lets developers dive in to the details of apps running on the Parse platform by making queries of logs with a new query language.
11. Facebook expands LiveRail ad network, but it’s not in a deathmatch with Google — yet
Facebook’s announced that it is expanding LiveRail, the video ad platform it purchased in 2014 — putting it in more direct competition with Google. The social giant said that LiveRail will now support display ads and native ads for mobile apps, not just desktop sites. It will also be able to tap into Facebook’s anonymous user info for better targeting. And publishers can manage ads sold directly to advertisers, as well as ones using programmatic sources, like demand-side platforms or ad networks.
12. WhatsApp co-founder: Voice calling coming to iOS in a ‘couple weeks’
Voice calling on WhatsApp will be coming to iOS in a “couple weeks,” said WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton today.
At Facebook’s F8 developers’ conference here today, Acton, speaking on a panel with Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and head of Facebook Messenger David Marcus, said that WhatsApp has spent the last year refining and iterating voice calling before launching it on Android. To date it has not been available for iOS, but he said it would be coming in a couple weeks.
13. Facebook’s latest deep learning tech can quickly interpret text and video
Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer today showed off the newest capabilities of the company’s artificial intelligence systems. Not only can they mine images, but they can also recognize actions like sports in video, and they can answer questions about text, too.
Although the keynote is over, more news is bound to break during Facebook’s two-day developer conference. Check back for more as we update this list or follow along here.
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