Facebook’s annual F8 Conference is happening in San Francisco this week. The developer convention has wrapped up its first of two days, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other presenters had a bunch to share about how the social platform is about to transform itself. Some of this news has us more excited than the others but if you’re one of the 1.44 billion users worldwide (thanks, Siri), you’re about to see some changes.
Here’s what’s coming to your feed in the future, where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.
Facebook’s Surround 360 Camera
Photo: Facebook
This 360-degree, 3-D camera looks like a UFO disguised as a top. And while Facebook isn’t the first company to get in on the 360-degree camera action (Samsung’s Gear 360 and the awesome-looking Sphericam 2 are just two of the ones currently available), it’s taking a slightly different position.
The Surround 360 uses 17 cameras to capture the world around you, and the company is making the design specs and code completely open; both will be available on developer haven GitHub later this year. In the meantime, you can get a preview of what the thing can do — provided you aren’t using Safari — on its dedicated page.
Your profile pic is about to get way less pic-y
Facebook’s Profile Expression Kit is a developer tool that lets users include videos in their profiles. The closed beta is now underway, and it supports Boomerang by Instagram, Lollicam, BeautyPlus, Cinemagraph Pro by Flixel, Lollicam, MSQRD, and Vine.
This is going to be great news for people who wish their profile pictures would stop just sitting there doing nothing.
Facebook Messenger will contain robots
Photo: Facebook
I’m not super excited about the prospect of artificial-intelligence systems coming to Facebook’s Messenger app, but I’ll change my mind if someone can show me an interactive chat robot that isn’t so easily converted to Nazism. But Zuckerberg is, and it’s coming soon.
“As part of the new Messenger Platform, bots 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,” Facebook says on its news page. “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.”
What does this mean for you, the user? It means you may one day strike up a conversation with a company’s customer-service robot instead of sending an e-mail or talking to a human on the phone.
Get ready to share f***ing everything
You may think that you already get a bunch of different content when you sign in to Facebook, but the platform is about to add a few more tools that will surely not clutter up your News Feed.
Quote Sharing is Facebook’s version of something Twitter has already been doing. It will let you highlight text you see in apps or on the web and then post it to your page so that your friends can also enjoy reading it. So it’ll be just as annoying as the existing “Quotes” section in your friends’ profiles but way harder to ignore.
The Save Button has been around for a while; it lets users mark posts that they don’t have time to read at the moment so that they can come back to them later without scouring their feed to find it again. But the updated version goes beyond the site to let you grab content from all over the internet and throw it into your Facebook folder.
Finally, Facebook is opening up its Live API, the toolset that lets users post live videos from third-party apps. That means that more developers are going to be able to support this content, so you’ll probably be joining a bunch more of your friends on their coffee runs and other errands.
