At Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco, the social media giant made a number of major announcements about enhancements to its existing products and services.
Among the talking points coming out of F8 is what the future of Messenger will look like, with the reports being true that it is indeed being turned into a platform.
Other announcements include new features for users to create and share videos, as well as new tools for developers which I’m not going to get into too heavily here.
Here is an overview of some of the key announcements coming out of the F8 developer conference so far.
Messenger as a Platform
Facebook officially launched its messenger platform, which will allow developers to integrate features from Messenger into other apps.
One of the ways this can be used is to help users connect more directly with businesses. A feature was demonstrated showing how you can order from an online retailer, then change the order or shipping details later via Messenger.
For more details, see Facebook’s official announcement.
360-Degree Videos Coming to Facebook
It was announced that spherical, 360-degree videos will be coming to Facebook at some point in the near future. These spherical videos will also be brought to the Oculus VR platform.
Embeddable Facebook Videos
Videos uploaded directly to Facebook will soon be embeddable across the web. This also gives much more incentive for content creators to upload video directly to Facebook over a competitive video platform like YouTube.
Previously, videos uploaded to Facebook lived only on Facebook. With the ability to easily share those videos across the web, I think we’re about to see video uploads on Facebook increase dramatically.
The F8 developer conference continue today, which can be live streamed at F8.com starting at 9am Pacific.
