Facebook held its annual F8 developer’s conference today that laid out the foundation for what the company plans to accomplish as far out as the next ten years. Today’s keynote presentation focused more on what the next year at Facebook and its products would look like for customers. Putting a heavy emphasis on Messenger and Facebook Live, it’s fair to say that you’ll be seeing a lot of these changes coming to mobile very soon.
Facebook Live
Starting off with one of Facebook’s newest products, Facebook announced that they are working to more prominently display and showcase users on their Facebook Live platform. The explosive growth of its live streaming feature has pushed Facebook into making live video discovery easier for all users.
Similar to how Snapchat has a Discover area, Facebook’s new Live tab in the Facebook app will bring friends, celebrities, and other influencers into the video streaming spotlight. During the F8 keynote, presenters were sure to show celebrities like Vin Diesel who have been big proponents of the platforms since its launch.
For developers, Facebook has also introduced its Live API with drone maker DJI as a launch partner. Developers will now be able to directly integrate the Facebook Live platform into their apps making video streaming ubiquitous across all applications.
DJI was shown using the Live API today as they had already begun integrating it into their Phantom drones. The Live API was able to embed Facebook’s Live chat over the DJI UI, allowing operators to fly around and keep an eye on the conversation at the same time. Facebook stated that a firmware update would be coming to the Phantoms soon that would enable the integration, although what models would be enabled wasn’t made clear.
Messenger
Messenger also got a laundry list of updates today, although most of them won’t be immediately obvious to most users. The biggest of these will be that Facebook is opening their Messenger and Bots platform for all developers today.
Opening the Messenger Platform to businesses gives them another avenue to directly communicate with customers without the customer having to download yet another app. David Marcus, Facebook’s head of Messaging Products, showed an example where he was able to set requirements for a shoe he was looking for, select the one he wanted, and purchase it all within the Messenger application. While many other chat applications are building with a focus around chatting alone, Facebook believes that a healthy mix of UI and conversation will be the route to go.
Facebook’s Messenger Platform also opened the doors for companies to build out their own conversational bots using the Wit.ai Bot Engine. On stage it was explained that a developer would feed the bot a few sample conversations, and using AI and machine learning it would quickly learn around your content. Spring, Poncho, and CNN are currently using bots on the Messenger platform. Stay tuned for more on this…
Account Logins
The last announcement from today that you may start seeing creep up into new applications is the use of Facebook’s newly launched Account Kit. You may be accustomed to seeing apps allowing you to use your Facebook account to login or sign-up to a service, but today’s Account Kit takes it further by allowing you to use just your phone number.
Developers will now be able to integrate Facebook’s Account Kit into their applications giving users the ability to sign-up and log in using a phone number, Facebook account, or email address. When signing up with an email, a confirmation code will be sent via SMS to the user where they will then be able to use that to login. The general experience is similar to Apple’s Two Factor Authentication process.
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Didn’t they announce anything that will drain my battery even faster? I was really looking forward to that.
Did we want a Facebook ecosystem?
Not my phone it won’t.
It would be better if facebook announced a decent web based Whatsapp. Something like Telegram.
Uninstalled it a month ago (battery was getting destroyed). Unsurprisingly, haven’t been logging in anywhere near as frequently as when I had the native app. Where-as I would check my feed multiple times a day, I’m now doing so once a week. Far too much to enjoy in the real world to get swept up in FB.
Havent they fixed this battery issues with the facebook app?
Soooo have they found a way to make the video and audio quality HD and make live streaming available to the desktop web version of Facebook?
Facebook’s video compression is the worst in the business.
Facebook is trying to be in many places at the same time and most of the time, they just end up closing the branches they open.. Jack of many trades; master of one (social media).
Havent they fixed the battery issue?
‘The world of Facebook’ coming to my iPhone? Not a chance in hell, sorry Zuck.
Agreed. I use FaceBook for two things. I follow some theatrical groups, and use the ID to log into third party sites, like this one. I post nothing, friend no one, and accept no requests. I don’t even have it in my bookmarks, I go directly to the pages of the groups I follow. So nope, no vampiric Facebook App, no FaceBook spying on my messages, no FaceBook live streaming. Sorry Zuch, but nope. You just ain’t worth it.
Facebook Account Kit is the thing i was looking forward too. I won’t have to remember so many tedious passwords.:). And yeah messenger improvements are welcome too. Facebook isn’t a battery hog on Android though at least for me.
I used to have errors with the Facebook App on iOS. sometimes it wouldn’t update, sometimes it would say the newest stuff was posts from 2 days prior. It got really bad, and so I just made a homepage icon of the Web-based link. Wow, so much nicer. I can Message there too. The only “drawback” is not being notified with a little red bubble. but that also means I am on it less. it is awesome.
i don’t see any desire to continue with a love-fest to Facebook
Uninstalled the Facebook and Messenger apps more than a year ago. Facebook is just irrelevant to me these days.