Facebook F8 2015 Conference Highlights, What’s New and Exciting

Facebook F8 is the mostly annual conference held by Facebook. It is basically for developers and entrepreneurs who build products and services around the website. The name F8 derives from the tradition at Facebook of having eight hour Hackathons. This year it has taken place in San Francisco,  California (25^th – 26^th March, 2015). In this Facebook has often introduced new features and made new announcements.

The company unveiled many things including what new will be there in Messenger platform, and more. Here are some of the announcements made by the Facebook at the conference so far.

Facebook Messenger Platform

Facebook announced the launch of its Messenger Platform; the new service enables developers to add Messenger features to other apps. The platform inserts the Messenger service directly into the vast ecosystem of iOS and Android apps, and this thing will help Messenger to become more competitive with other messaging platforms.

Last week, Facebook announced a new payment system that enables users to send and receive money directly through the stand alone messaging system. Along with this the Messenger app store provides rationale for why Facebook forced people on mobile to use a standalone Messenger app.

The new platform is open to all developers, but it has already lined up 40 different launch partners, including ESPN, imgur, The Weather Channel and Giphy.

Messenger will soon let users connect directly with businesses, replacing retailers chat windows in the process. The users will be able to place an order with an online retailer, and then change the order or shipping details later via Messenger.

Facebook will make users to connect directly with Businesses

This is the new feature announced by Zuckerberg in the conference. He demonstrated that users will be able to place an order with an online retailer, and then change the order or shipping details later via Messenger.

The function appears to pre-empt the native chat features on many retailers’ sites. Messenger will open up a threaded message with a retailer after an order is placed. The user can use the thread to ask freedom question of the retailer. The platform also sends an instant shipping notification to the user’s cell phone when they make a purchase. Facebook said that this feature will be out in the next few weeks.

360-degree Videos Support on the Way

Zuckerberg said that Facebook will soon support spherical 360-degree videos in its Newsfeed. The company will bring these spherical videos to Oculus VR.

This feature is not that much surprising when you knew that YouTube recently started supporting the style of video.

Parse unveils SDK for the Internet of Things

Facebook has introduced a new software development kits for its Parse mobile app development platform, enabling developers to incorporate data from internet-connected devices. Parse is already being tapped for IoT use cases. Companies like Chamberlain are using Parse to build great connected experiences for your home.

Parse as a whole has been expanding internationally, the number of active apps on Parse increased by 90%.

Facebook has paid out $8 Billion to Developers

Over the past 5 years Facebook has given more than $8 Billion to developers building on its platform. More than 30 million apps have been made using Facebook’ platform.

Mobile App Analytics Tool

This tool is designed to let mobile developers track the user behaviour in apps, as well as ads that to promote the apps. The tool will allow developers to detect parts of the apps that users find difficult to use. Tool might compare the usage habits or install rates of current users with users from a month ago. It can also provide information on the geography, age, gender and language of app users.

A segmentation feature can be used to drill down on key user groups to learn more about what makes them engage in certain behaviours. The analytical tool lets the developers learn about the people who click on advertisements on Facebook. Developers can use the tool to track app advertisement campaigns on other social platforms.

Zuckerberg said 95% of apps on the Apple and Google app stores are integrated with Facebook.

Embeddable Videos

Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. According to this it will be a lot easier for users to share videos elsewhere.

Previously, users had to embed entire Facebook comments to share Facebook videos on other sites. Now the comments plugin will sync with comment threads on Facebook. If user will comment on a site, that comment will also show up on Facebook. The feature is live for select publishers.

Facebook did not say the Oculus Rift will arrive this Year

Chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer briefly discussed about the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay prototype, saying the Oculus VR team is “just on the cusp” of delivering the sense of presence that blends virtual reality’s role in the future, and how Facebook wants to play a part in this new way of bringing people together.

Oculus Rift will not arrive this year, a consumer version is more likely to come in 2016, Facebook could potentially speed up the process.

Facebook Messenger passes 600M monthly users

According to the current data of the company Facebook Messenger now has 600 million monthly users. You need to know this that these numbers of users are those who quickly use whatever developers build for the platform.

Facebook Messenger has passed 500 million monthly active users in November 2014. In just 4 months app gained 100 million users.

FB Messengers biggest competitor is the Facebook owned WhatsApp, which has passed 700 million active users in January 2015 up from 600 million in August. In just 4 months WhatsApp also added 100 million users.

Monthly active users’ comparison:-

WeChat – 468 million in November 2014
Instagram – 300 million users in December 2014
Viber – 236 million users in January 2015
Line – 181 million users in January 2015
SnapChat – 100 million users in August 2014

Facebook needs to ensure the apps stay relevant in a highly crowded market.

Parse Explorer – Debugging Tool

Parse Explorer – this service will make developers dive in to the details of apps running on the Parse platform by making queries of logos with a new query language. Developers can sort, filter count and limit a range of logs with Parse Explorer. They can save queries and make charts.

Parse Explorer also show developers the latency for their application programming interface (API) requests. Parse is gradually turning on the new service for customers. It runs on top of Amazon Web services, the giant of the cloud infrastructure market.

Facebook expands LiveRail ad network

LiveRail – the video ad platform it purchased in 2014 , 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. Publishers can manage ads sold directly to advertisers.

This feature will solve one of large publishers’ biggest problems in mobile apps.

Voice calling coming to iOS in a ‘couple of weeks’

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. There are already ways to use the voice calling feature on iOS and screenshots of the implementation have circulated, but it requires a jailbroken iPhone.

No clarity is there about the time when it’s going to be launch as it can be several weeks or few weeks.

Facebook’s latest deep learning tech can quickly interpret text and video

Like Twitter, Baidu, Google and other companies, Facebook has been adding on artificial intelligence talent and developing systems for a type of AI called deep learning. The latest innovations from Facebook's fall clearly in that category.

The advances in question answering were documented in an academic paper called “Memory Networks”.

Schroepfer demonstrated how Facebook can now identify hundreds of sports as they happen, even if they are similar. The video work follows advancements from a start-up called Clarifai, which earlier this year expanded deep learning systems beyond image recognition. Now the start-up’s technology can pick up on objects that appear in videos.

More news is bound to break during Facebook’s two-day developer conference. 

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