F8 2016 kicked off today, with a packed house of more than 2,600 people and hundreds of thousands of people watching via Facebook Live.
Mark Zuckerberg kicked the conference off with a keynote detailing Facebook’s 10-year technology roadmap, and the ways those technologies will help bring people together and give everyone a voice.
Other keynote speakers included Deb Liu, who leads Facebook’s developer platform group; Ime Archibong, a director of strategic partnerships who works closely with the global developer community; David Marcus, who leads the Facebook Messenger group; and Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer.
Day one announcements included:
- Live API: Facebook Live has been incredibly successful, and now we’re opening up our API so developers can design even more ways for people and publishers to interact and share in real time on Facebook.
- Bots for Messenger: As part of the new Messenger Platform, bots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages — all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them. The Messenger Send / Receive API will support not only sending and receiving text, but also images and interactive rich bubbles containing multiple calls-to-action.
- Facebook Surround 360: We’ve designed and built a 3D-360 camera system called Facebook Surround 360 that produces sharp, truly spherical footage in 3D. The system includes stitching technology that seamlessly marries the video from 17 cameras, vastly reducing post-production effort and time. We’ll be making the design specs and stitching code available on GitHub this summer.
- Profile Expression Kit: People can now use third-party apps to create fun and personality-infused profile videos with just a few taps. The closed beta kicks off today with support for six apps: Boomerang by Instagram, Lollicam, BeautyPlus, Cinemagraph Pro by Flixel, Lollicam, MSQRD, and Vine.
- Free Basics Simulator & Demographic Insights: It’s now easier for developers to build for Free Basics with the Free Basics Simulator, which lets them see how their service will appear in the product, and Demographic Insights, which helps them better understand the types of people using their services.
- Account Kit: Account Kit gives people the choice to log into new apps with just their phone number or email address, helping developers grow their apps to new audiences.
- Facebook Analytics for Apps updates: More than 450,000 unique apps already use this product to understand, reach, and expand their audiences, and we’re now introducing more features to help developers and marketers grow their businesses with deeper audience insights, and push and in-app notifications (beta).
- Quote Sharing: Quote Sharing is new way for people to easily share quotes they find around the web or in apps with their Facebook friends.
- Save Button: The Save Button lets people save interesting articles, products, videos, and more from around the web into their Saved folder on Facebook, where they can easily access it later from any device.
For more details on today’s news, see our Developer Blog, Media Blog, and Engineering Blog, and you can you can watch all the Day One keynotes on the Facebook for Developers page.
F8 2016 continues tomorrow, with more details on our 10 year roadmap to connect everyone and to give people new ways to share using artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Keynote speakers include Mike Schroepfer, our chief technology officer; Christine Abernathy, who leads our open source program; Jay Parikh, our global head of engineering and infrastructure; Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, who leads our Applied Machine Learning team; and Yaser Sheikh, the head of our Oculus Research team in Pittsburgh.
Watch the full keynote here.