Facebook’s developers conference known as F8 is currently in progress. Day 1 of the conference was full of surprise announcements and has made a promising start. Let’s dig into the first day’s proceedings.
Some Stats
At F8, Facebook also revealed some useful statistics. For all the statistics fans out there, Facebook has reached more than 1.39 billion active monthly users, while Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp have 300, 600 and 700 million monthly active users respectively.
Facebook Messenger as a Platform
A few months ago, Facebook forced its users to download and use the standalone Facebook Messenger app as they unbundled it from the Facebook app. According to Zuckerberg, it was a move to enhance the quality of social messaging experience, which was not possible within a tab in the Facebook app. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook introduced a payment system within its messaging service through which users can send money to their friends. All these moves suggested Facebook Messenger is about to get something big. F8 just confirms that by opening up Messenger as a platform for developers. This mean that developers will be able to harness the power of Facebook Messenger and create 3rd party applications that hook into the information Messenger provides and create feature rich experiences for users.
FB Embeddable Videos
Facebook now allows users to embed their Facebook videos on other websites. It is pretty early to make any assumptions, but we think this move may be influenced to capitalize the $42.6 billion video advertising industry.
Introducing Spherical Video in the newsfeed
A spherical video is a 3d video in which you can pan around with your mouse cursor. Facebook will now support 3D, spherical videos in the newsfeed. Facebook has already acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality technology company. So, we can expect a virtual reality (VR) experience very soon in which we can enjoy these spherical videos.
Parse for Internet Of Things
Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot trending topic these days, as many tech companies are trying to connect things around us for a unified experience. Facebook introduced Parse for Internet Of Things, a set of SDKs that act as the backend brains for IoT projects. It’s compatible with Arduino (an open-source electronics platform) and will include other platforms in the future.
LiveRail
LiveRail is an ad exchange that fills ad space within apps and sites to the highest bidder. Facebook acquired LiveRail last year. At F8, Facebook announces two changes:
- It will support mobile display ads in addition to video
- It will be able to jump into a pool of anonymized Facebook data to decide which ad to display.
Analytics for Apps
Facebook introduces new analytics platform, which will help developers figure out their app’s usage. Now developers can use this analytics tool to collect data to get a better understanding of their apps’ performance and user behavior. Data may include, but not limited to region, gender, age, platforms, and devices.
New Realtime Comments System
The new comment update enables comments to show up in real time. Comments will sync between the story page and the shared story item on our Facebook Page.
Wrap Up
Overall, it is a promising first day of the F8 conference, filled with exciting announcements and news. We hope to hear more exciting announcements on the second day of the event, so stay tuned.
