Facebook F8 is a mostly-annual conference held by
Meta Platforms (formerly
Facebook) since 2007, intended for developers and entrepreneurs who build products and services around the website. The event has generally started with a
keynote speech by Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg, followed by various breakout sessions concentrating on specific topics. Facebook has often introduced new features and made new announcements at the conference.
The "F8" name comes from Facebook's tradition of 8 hour
hackathons.
Facebook F8 was hosted in
San Francisco,
California from 2007 to 2016, then in a more central
Silicon Valley location in
San Jose, California from 2017 to 2019. In 2020 and 2021, it was a virtual event due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. There was no F8 event in 2009, 2012, 2013 or 2022. The 2022 event was replaced by an event called Conversations, focusing on the
metaverse.
2007
The first F8 event was held on May 24, 2007, at the San Francisco Design Center in
San Francisco. The notion of the
social graph was introduced.
2008
The 2008 F8 event was held on July 23, 2008, at the San Francisco Design Center once again. News and announcements from this event included:
* Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More
* Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website
2010
The 2010 F8 event was held on April 21, 2010 at the San Francisco Design Center. The main announcement was the feature to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on a website by the owner. This feature is now integrated within around 2.5 million websites worldwide, with 10,000 more being added daily.
Additional news and announcements included:
* Social Plugins (e.g.
Like button)
* Open Graph Protocol
* Graph API
* OAuth 2.0
2011
F8 2011 was held on September 22, 2011. Various things Facebook introduced at the conference included a new profile redesign named 'Timeline' that showed a history of user's activity on their profile, and a broader, more advanced version of the 'Open Graph' protocol.
The F8 2011 event was mainly focused on introducing new products, transforming industries, building and growing social applications and product Q&A. Some of the details of the topics were:
* The Future of Digital Music
* Mobile + Social
* The Rise of Social Gaming
* Investing in Social
* Developing Products at Facebook
* Social Design
* Distribution: Growing on Facebook
* Marketing on Facebook
* Hack Better: New Tools for Developers
* Inside HTML5 Development at Facebook
* Making Fast Social Apps
2014
File:Mark Zuckerberg - Move Fast and Break Things.jpg, Early, hacker-geared motto: ''Move Fast and Break Things''...
File:Mark Zuckerberg - Move Fast with Stable Infra.jpg, ...to new motto: ''Move Fast with Stable Infra''
F8 2014 was announced on March 8, 2014 by Facebook representative Ilya Sukhar that the F8 event would return on April 30.
The conference was focused on Facebook's strategy to become a 'cross-platform platform'.
Here is a list of the main topics:
* Audience Network
* Autofill With Facebook
* Anonymous Login
* Removing The Ability To Pull Friends' Data
* Granular Mobile Privacy Permissions
* 2-Year Core API Stability Guarantee
* Graph API 2.0
* FbStart
* Mobile Like Button
* Send to Mobile
* Message Dialog
* AppLinks
* Visualization APIs For Media
* Pricing changes
* Analytics and Offline Storage
* Internet.org Innovation Lab
* DisplayNode
2015
The 2015 F8 conference was held on March 25, 2015 at the
Fort Mason Center
Fort Mason, in San Francisco, California originated as a coastal defense site during the American Civil War. The nucleus of the property was owned by John C. Frémont and disputes over compensation by the United States continued into 1968. In ...
.
2016
The 2016 F8 conference was held on April 12 and 13, 2016.
Announcements: Facebook Analytics adds push and in app notifications feature
2017
The 2017 F8 conference was held on April 18 and 19, 2017, at the
San Jose Convention Center
The San Jose McEnery Convention Center (commonly known simply as the San Jose Convention Center) is a convention center in Downtown San Jose, California. The facility is the largest convention center in Silicon Valley. It is known for hosting h ...
in San Jose, California. Announcements included:
* Integrating the camera more into Facebook and Messenger, including more 360° features
* New
augmented reality
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be def ...
platform, challenging
Snapchat
*
Facebook Messenger: chat extensions including
Spotify,
Apple Music
Apple Music is a music, audio and video streaming service developed by Apple Inc. Users select music to stream to their device on-demand, or they can listen to existing playlists. The service also includes the Internet radio stations Apple Mu ...
, and
Aeromexico - which are called up by the user but do not chat in groups; improved discovery, further integration of
M (
virtual assistant)
*
Virtual reality hangout app for
Oculus Rift
*
Deep learning
Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
D ...
framework
Caffe2
Caffe (Convolutional Architecture for Fast Feature Embedding) is a deep learning framework, originally developed at University of California, Berkeley. It is open source, under a BSD license. It is written in C++, with a Python interface.
H ...
* New 360° surround cameras
* Helicopters that provide internet via fiber optic cable
* Building 8 project aiming to allow people to type straight from their brain and hear through their skin
2018
The 2018 F8 conference was held on the first two days of May 2018 at the
McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. At the conference, Facebook announced the creation of their own online dating service. Shares in the dating business
Match Group
Match Group, Inc. is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOf ...
fell by 22% after the announcement. Announcements included:
* Facebook's mission being to "defy distance"
* Hugo Barra opened up his keynote talk mentioning Itaipu VR, produced by a Brazilian developer, Imersys.
2019
The 2019 F8 conference was held at the end of April 2019 and the beginning of May 2019 at the
McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. During the keynote,
Mark Zuckerberg announced: "The future is private."
2020
The 2020 F8 conference was held on April 25, 2020 as a virtual event due to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
2021
The 2021 F8 conference, AKA F8 Refresh, was held on June 2-3, 2021 as another virtual event.
2022
The 2022 F8 conference was canceled on April 6 in favor of Conversations, which was held on May 19 as a virtual event, focused on Meta Platforms'
virtual reality Metaverse initiative.
References
Further reading
* Barnett, Emma
"Facebook f8: Zuckerberg announces revamp: Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced a host of changes to the site at the social network's f8 conference in San Francisco" ''
The Telegraph
''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include:
Australia
* ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...
'' (London), September 22, 2011.
External links
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Web-related conferences
Events in San Francisco
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Recurring events established in 2007
Software development events
2007 establishments in California