Last week saw Mark Zuckerberg take to the stage at Facebook's annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco. In his first address, Zuckerberg laid out the future for Facebook by revealing the ‘10 Year Roadmap’, detailing the next steps the social media giant will be taking. His announcements made it clear that Facebook's future is firmly based around Virtual and Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Connectivity.
However, there was plenty to discuss from the event. Here’s what we think were the biggest announcements from Facebook F8 2016.
Bots In Messenger
This was one of the expected announcements at this year's conference, the company had been relatively tight lipped about everything else. On the new Facebook Messenger Platform, bots - automated programs that help users communicate with businesses - can provide services such as online purchases and support.
The new chatbot functionality is part of Facebook's effort to build out its instant messaging app as the go-to place for customer to business interaction. If it works, this is a strategy that could fundamentally change the customer service sector - will there still be a need for call centres when a customer's enquiries can be handled by AI’s?
A 360 Degree Camera
The new Facebook Surround 360 camera can capture footage via 17 cameras and then pull all of the images together via a web-based application. The idea behind the system is to create perfectly spherical films tailored to each eye that can be rendered in 4K and 8K and of course viewed in Virtual Reality (as is to be expected since Facebook acquired Oculus Rift in 2014). The plans needed to construct an array at home will be open source and the software application capable of taking all of the information from each of the lenses and pulling it all together will be equally free to use.
Profile Expression Kit
You may have seen this action on Facebook already if you have seen someone with a moving profile picture. This is being rolled out further and now users can use third-party apps to create profile videos. The beta test is currently available with support for six apps: Boomerang by Instagram, Lollicam, BeautyPlus, Cinemagraph Pro by Flixel, Lollicam, MSQRD, and Vine.
Save to Facebook & Live API
Another new product is a ‘Save to Facebook’ button, which will send content from anywhere on the Internet to your "Saved for later" section on the main Facebook portal. On top of this, Facebook is opening its Live API to developers and publishers to expand beyond the app to create live videos. This was another expected development as video has been featuring more and more on Facebook in recent times, but what it ill look like in the future is anyone's guess.
