Facebook F8 2015: What you need to know - Sound Bites

Salomon Dayan – 03/25/15 1

Sound Bites Facebook Developer Conference F8

2015 (Day 1)

Main theme: How to use the Faceboook’s ecosystem to monetize your app

Facebook’s annual developer conference started today March 3rd, 2015. 2 full days of news related to the big Social Media giant The talk focused on ways to build, grow and monetize apps With 1.4 billion people using Facebook, they claimed that they are making changes that put people first

The keynote had 3 main themes: BUILD: Making it faster, easier, and cheaper to develop cross-platform apps GROW: Helping you reach all the right people and keep them engaged MONETIZE: Earn more from your apps Watch the keynote and more on demand videos at https://f8.facebooklive.com/

2 Salomon Dayan – 03/25/15

https://f8.facebooklive.com/


In the past year, Facebook has released a half dozen apps Paper, Hyperlapse, Slingshot, Groups, Rooms and others. The company has reoriented its business to respond to usage patterns around the word

Among other stats related to apps: • More than 30 million apps and sites have been built using

Facebook's tools" Zuckerberg said

• More than 80 percent of top 100 apps use FB login

• Facebook committed to fix more than 90% of small bugs you report with 30 days, in addition to 48 hour commitment on major bugs

More than 1.4 billion people use the core Facebook app, but more than 700M use Groups and WhatsApp and 600M use Messenger, Zuckerberg says


Zuckerberg went through couple of slides that showed how communication on Facebook has evolved to include photos and videos “If you look back at Facebook five years ago, most of the content that people shared was text — status updates and wall posts. Now, it’s photos. If you fast-forward five years, it’s going to be video. If you look even further beyond that, it’s probably going to be more immersive content like VR and AR.” Zuckerberg said

“Soon we're going to start supporting spherical videos in News Feed” “We're going to bring spherical videos to Oculus, too” Zuckerberg said

That term — immersive content — was a key theme of the keynote portion

Sharing is Evolving



Facebook has been adding photos, videos, location, and voice calling to Messenger they announced Messenger Platform-- a way for developers to hook their apps into the service Messenger Platform allows to provide the kind of immersive content Zuckerberg referred to: • Messenger Partners: Facebook has opened the Messenger

platform, so now people can quickly create a video with JibJab or a GIF with Giphy or ESPN and quickly share it with a friend. More than 40 apps are launch partners.

• Businesses on Messenger: Now, when you order a product through certain retailers, you can be updated on shipping via Messenger.

• Updated sharing: Facebook knows that often, when people share something through the site, they really only want a specific group of people to see the post. Facebook is simplifying and enhancing the selection process for users.

FB's David Marcus closed saying: "It's time for us to reinvent how people and businesses communicate."

Messenger as a Platform

now Parse is rolling out tools for the Internet of Things.



Facebook Parse cofounder and chief executive Ilya Sukhar spoke during the conference unveiling Facebook actions for the Internet of Things Parse is rolling out tools for the Internet of Things. A set of SDKs that act as the backend brains for IoT projects It is currently compatible with Arduino and other platforms are on their way Facebook wants to make it easier for developers to weave data from connected devices into their applications

Software for the

Internet Of Things

Movement makes sense as startups providing platforms for building and running apps have been talking about or releasing services for handling data from the Internet of Things “If a few IoT use cases and apps take off on Parse, the data from and access into the connected devices could ultimately extend Facebook’s “social graph” with a larger IoT graph, which would open up a larger advertising opportunity for Facebook” – Venture Beat


Deborah Liu, Director of Platform at Facebook, introduced a series of new products that goes from upgrades in current features such as social plug in as complete new products/services These announcements included: • App Links: An open-source, cross-platform solution for

mobile deep linking. Over 20 top mobile apps have partnered with us to make all kinds of great content available for linking

Facebook Platform to

facilitate build, growth and monetize

your app

New Realtime Comments System: Unified conversation with publishers. Talking about the Facebook Comments plugin - new version rolling out.

It will sync comments between a website and Facebook page. E.g., leave comment on Huffington Post site and it syncs to the related post on their FB Page.. Currently in testing with HuffPo, BuzzFeed and others.


Facebook Embedded video player. You will now be able to take videos from Facebook and embed them in third-party sites Starting today, users will see an embed option on their videos. They’ll then be prompted to copy and paste the necessary HTML code onto their website

Creators now have

more control over their content

The change is part of a greater shift towards improving the video experience on Facebook, and taking YouTube on more seriously. The company recently introduced revamped video sections for pages to highlight content on business and brand pages


The tool will measure the app’s performance of across devices, and offer demographic data, such as age, gender and location. The tool will also offer


"We're introducing Facebook Analytics for Apps," Liu says. “Allowing you to see how people interact with your apps. It differs from other analytics tools as it's people-focused and you can see how users behave across different devices.” Facebook Analytics for Apps helps developers build better apps and experiences for people. Developers now have a single place where they can understand their audience, measure how people use their app across devices and improve their marketing campaigns.

Updated App Insights to make it

more actionable and reliable

metrics on segments, cohorts and funnels so developers can see how specific groups of people using which OS are responding to their app, especially during feature changes or updates.



Audience Network is about giving developers a new way to effectively monetize mobile apps. Audience Network offers developers rich audience targeting and ad formats that have proven to work on mobile. Mobile app publishers can now use LiveRail’s monetization platform to manage their video and display ads business. Additionally, LiveRail is enabling publishers to use Facebook’s approach for delivering the right ad to the right audience—meaning better results and better experiences for people

Let publishers monetize both video and display ads in mobile apps



In Summary Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the morning keynote and highlighted three themes of F8 this year: 1. Putting people first 2. Giving people more options to connect through the

Facebook family of apps 3. Previewing the future of sharing

Facebook announced more than 25 products and tools to help developers build, grow, and monetize mobile apps

F8 2015:

New Ways to Connect with the Facebook Family of Apps

Among the key announcements and potential implications • Messenger Platform and Spherical 360 video can become a

leap forward on how businesses communicate with people • Facebook SDK for IoT could eventually provide some

integration across products and services so much needed in the current fragmented ecosystem

• Upgrades in Analytics and Audience Network continue to

show Facebook commitment to improve advertisement effectiveness
