Facebook F8 Conference Overview

So Facebook’s F8 Conference happened 2 days ago after a 3 year absence, with developers gathering to discuss how to make Facebook better for everyone. Mark Zuckerburg was one of the speakers and many other people were also lined up for talks. Over 1500 developers attended so it really was a lot of brainpower in one place.

One item off the Facebook F8 Conference 2014 agenda that caught our attention was that they discussed ways to improve internet connectivity for countries (*cough* Zambia *cough*) that do not have full access to it, especially remote ones. We sat up straight for this one!

Facebook , along with Nokia, Opera, Ericsson, MediaTek,  Qualcomm and Samsung have gotten together to form Internet.org, which is a partnership to increase the efficient use of data, making internet access affordable, and helping businesses create new business models and services that will drive Internet access. 

According to the website itself, Internet.org is ‘a global partnership dedicated to making affordable internet access available to the two thirds of the world not yet connected’. 

So basically this is in order to make sure internet access reaches the world over, with a chance of cheaper but quality phones being rolled out. Sounds good doesn’t it? We thought so too.

There were in-depth talks on how to increase  Facebook’s mobile app’s integration with other apps.  We should be able to share more data from other apps to our Facebook page with ourselves or our friends. This will make it hard for you to want to delete your Facebook app because you will definitely need it to log in to other apps. Feel trapped? A little?

The mobile app push will not be just for third party apps but also for Facebook itself. The Facebook F8 Conference also focused on improving and/or creating Facebook’s own apps (e.g Whatsapp, Paper).

We can’t wait to see what’s in store with this app that almost everybody the world over uses.

Picture Credits: Gomuda, Internet Observatory.