By Deborah Liu, Head of Platform, Facebook
F8, our annual developer conference, kicked off this morning in San Francisco with more than 2,500 developers coming together to build the next generation of apps. In the last year, our developer community doubled in size, and there are now hundreds of thousands of developers working with Facebook around the world – with more than 70% outside the United States.
Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the morning keynote and highlighted three themes of F8 this year: Putting people first, giving people more options to connect through the Facebook family of apps, and previewing the future of sharing.
Today we announced more than 25 products and tools to help developers build, grow, and monetize mobile apps. Facebook provides connections between every mobile platform and a potential audience of 1.39 billion people, so developers can focus on doing what they do best — innovating.
- Messenger Platform — Introducing a new way for apps to integrate with Messenger so people can better express themselves with GIFs, photos, videos, audio clips and more. For developers, this means more opportunities for growth and engagement.
- Businesses on Messenger — Previewing the first steps we’re taking to reinvent the way people communicate and interact with businesses.
- New Share Sheet — A simple, consistent experience for sharing from apps to Facebook.
- Facebook Analytics for Apps — Facebook Analytics for Apps helps developers build better apps and experiences for people. Developers now have a single place where they can understand their audience, measure how people use their app across devices and improve their marketing campaigns.
- LiveRail— Mobile app publishers can now use LiveRail’s monetization platform to manage their video and display ads business. Additionally, LiveRail is enabling publishers to use Facebook’s approach for delivering the right ad to the right audience—meaning better results and better experiences for people.
- Internet of Things — Developers can now easily use Parse to build a whole new category of apps for connected devices, from garage door openers to smoke detectors to wearable wristbands.
- Social Plugins — Refreshed Social Plugins with updated designs and better mobile experiences that will help people engage with content off Facebook. The Embedded Video Player is an entirely new social plugin that lets publishers embed native Facebook videos in a full-bleed video player. People can now watch and interact with Facebook videos from anywhere on the web.
- Spherical Video Coming to News Feed — Previewing an immersive, 360-degree video experience in News Feed that lets you choose the viewing angle to explore your surroundings.
For more details on all the products announced today, see our Developer Blog, or watch a replay of today’s keynote here:
Check back for the keynote on Day 2 with Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash discussing the latest work from Connectivity Lab, Facebook AI Research, and Oculus and how these efforts are changing the future of communications and technology. Watch the livestream here.