F8 2016: Supercharging Messenger and More

Facebooks annual developers conference, F8, has kicked off in San Francisco, with the traditional keynote speech by Mark Zuckerberg revealing the latest technology the social media giant is working on, and placing the companys Messenger app front and centre in its plans for the future.

how-to-search-for-bots-on-messengerRise of the Machines
Officially named as Messenger Platform (Beta), the supercharged messaging service will integrate a whole range of new tools, most notably the introduction of technology-of-the-moment, chat bots. The bots can perform functions from subscribed services for automated weather and traffic updates to customised communications like receipts, shipping notifications, travel information and more.

The Messenger Send/Receive API will enable developers to build bots that not only send and receive text, but images and interactive rich bubbles that can contain multiple calls-to-action and deeply enrich a companys opportunity to communicate with consumers.

The API is available to all developers and businesses starting today, although bots will have to be submitted for review before being introduced to the Messenger ecosystem. Developers can also gain access to Wit.ais Bot Engine, enabling them to build more complex bots that can learn over time and comprehend natural language and sophisticated inquiries.

Beyond that, there are powerful discovery tools such as plugins for websites, usernames and a prominent search surface in Messenger, as well as strengthened interactions between the core Facebook app and Messenger, such as the ability to open Messenger threads directly from the News Feed.

facebook 360 videoVideo Goes Live
Like bots, live-streaming is another hot technology, and Facebooks initial experiments with it have clearly proved successful, as the company has opened up its Facebook Live API to developers to enable more people to share and connect with live video in real time.

“In the short time since weve rolled out Facebook live to people and publishers around the world, weve seen incredible adoption, creativity and engagement,” said Daniel Danker, product manager at Facebook. “With the Live API, media organisations can seamlessly incorporate Live into their existing broadcast setup and also create new ways to interact with their viewers.”

Publishers with verified pages will be able to use the Live API via Facebooks publishing tools or through one of its media solutions partners, who have build video production, editing and streaming products that publish directly into Facebook Live and include features like on-screen graphics, instant replay and camera switching.

Facebook showed off examples from some of the media organisations its worked with during the development of Live, such as CNN creating live poll results in real time and Fox Sports, who used Grabyo to generate a live instant replay function from a Facebook Live broadcast while it was still in progress.

As part of its increasing commitment to video, Facebook also announced the development of a 3D-360 camera system that includes video stitching technology that can accommodate 17 cameras and vastly reduce post-production times. The system and design specs for the rig will be released this summer, with the aim of encouraging more publishers and content creators to experiment with 360 video and virtual reality.

Free Basics, Analytics and Saving
There a number of smaller announcements as part of the keynote, including the introduction of a Free Basics Simulator, enabling developers to see how their products would appear on Facebooks free internet project, which suffered setbacks earlier this year when it was banned in India.

Publishers and developers also got more analytics tools, such as Demographic Insights, to help them better understand the types of people using their services, and updates to Facebook Analytics for Apps, bringing deeper audience insights, as well as push and in-app notifications to the 450,000-plus apps using Facebooks tools.

On the consumer side of announcements, new tools included quote sharing, for snippets of text found around the web or in apps, and a Save button, enabling people to store interesting articles, videos and more from around the web in a folder within Facebook to be accessed later.

roadmap_finalFacebooks 10 Year Plan
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the conference by outlining his 10 year technology roadmap that showed off the way Facebooks services have multiplied over the years, and where they plan to head next, with future technologies identified for development including drones, AI vision, mobile VR, augmented reality tech and computer reasoning & planning.

The ambitious list of targets for the next 10 years was summed up by Zuckerberg in a Facebook post following his speech, saying “over the long run, were building planes and satellites to connect everyone to the internet; artificial intelligence to help us interact with services more easily; and virtual reality to help us experience the world in a totally new way.”

However, the wide array of technologies that Facebook is now investing in could drag the company away from its core service as a social network, and its main revenue sources of selling advertising and collecting data. Quite how VR and drones figure into those two fundamental elements is yet to be seen, but you certainly cant fault the companys vision.