Major news announced at Facebook’s F8 developer conference

Facebook yesterday and today (12th and 13th April) had their annual F8 developers’ conference where they announced new products, mostly to do with API integration of existing or transitioning-from-beta-stage products and these are the top announcements:

• Facebook launched Messenger chatbots that “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,” according to Facebook.

• Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger have grown immensely over the past year, with WhatsApp having over 60 billion messages every day sent through it, and messenger growing to 900 million active monthly users, 200 million more than they had last year. This is way more than what has been recorded for normal SMS being 20 billion messages per day.

• Facebook Live has been opened to developers who work with movie makers or use drones to capture images and videos to allow them stream that content directly to Facebook. It also has an open API to allow device makers integrate it into their products. As you live stream, Facebook’s Graph API allows you to see progression of your live video’s engagement and you can add and edit on-screen graphics such as comments and more.

• Instant Articles is now open to all publishers and they can integrate their publications to appear as full news articles on Facebook. It can be used with publishing tools like WordPress, Drupal, Atavist, Medium, Perk Distributed, RebelMouse, ShareThis, Sovrn, Steller and Tempest, and with analytics tools such as Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, comScore, Nielsen, Parsely, SimpleReach  Read how to strart using Instant Articles here.

• Rights Manager for videos on pages has been launched to help combat copyright infringement. If someone else uses your video it will be treated as a violation depending on your settings and you (original owner) will be notified of its use. Publishers can now keep a library of their videos posted online and have control of who can use it, specifying which other pages can use the video. Rights Manager will apply to Live video streams as well. An API is being worked on to let other developers create more ways to enable this feature work effortlessly for publishers from various kinds of media streams.

• Facebook Surround 360 was launched, a camera made to capture 3D-360degree shots to enable users who are photographers or artists make videos that have 3 dimensions, in 360 degrees. Videos made with this camera are compatible with the Facebook 360 video feature that has been appearing on our timelines since September last year. Facebook is also working on insights to help publishers determine a heat map of what content viewers spent more time on. 

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