At its developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook has revealed the future of the Messenger Platform, its first big play for the Internet of Things, and more.
Here's a list of everything that Facebook has announced at F8 so far:
Facebook officially unveils its Messenger Platform
Facebook has officially launched its Messenger Platform. The new service enables developers to add Messenger features to other apps.Things like Giphy, voice changers for voice messages and a number of other apps will be available on Messenger, making it a mini-app-store itself.
Facebook unveils embeddable videos
Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. This means you can easily share your videos elsewhere. Streaming videos would allow FB to stick more ads, meaning more revenue.
Facebook will support 360-degree videos soon
Facebook will soon support “spherical” 360-degree videos in its Newsfeed. These videos allows users to pan around the video with just mouse cursor. While spherical video does not look much on a flat screen, watching it using the Virtual Reality (VR) headset will ensure a 360 degrees spherical video feel. Facebook has already purchased Oculus VR, the developer of VR headset Oculus Rift.
SDKs for the Internet of Things
Facebook has introduced new software development kits for its Parse mobile app development platform. This enables developers to incorporate data from Internet-connected devices.
Soon connect directly with businesses
CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated an interesting new feature: Users will be able to place an order with an online retailer, then change the order or shipping details later via Messenger.
LiveRail
Last year, Facebook bought video advertising firm LiveRail to make video ads a bigger part of its business. LiveRail is an ad exchange program that fills ad space within apps and sites to the highest bidder. Facebook made two big changes: one, they'll now support mobile display ads in addition to video, and two, it will now be able to tap into Facebook data to determine which ad to show.
Analytics for apps
Facebook has launched a new app analytics tool, which is designed to let mobile developers track the user behavior in apps, as well as ads that promote the apps. The tool is available now, and it's free, Facebook's Deborah Liu said.
Facebook Messenger passes 600M monthly active users
Facebook Messenger now has 600 million monthly active users.
Facebook introduces Parse Explorer, a debugging tool
The service lets developers dive in to the details of apps running on the Parse platform by making queries of logs with a new query language.
Facebook's latest deep learning tech can quickly interpret text and video
The company's artificial intelligence systems can not only mine images, but they can also recognize actions like sports in video, and they can answer questions about text, too.
