F8 conference 2016: the biggest news from Facebook’s developer event

The search for the killer bot is well underway in Silicon Valley — but it’s off to a rocky start. Microsoft’s big push into artificial intelligence began with Tay, the teen-mimicking chatbot that Twitter users turned into a crazy racist in record time. Facebook’s introduction of bot-building platform this week at its F8 developer conference went more smoothly. But early adopters have complained about the bots’ mysterious user interfaces, their aggressive messaging, and the fact they don’t seem all that much smarter than a Microsoft Office wizard from the 1990s.

As Parker Thompson, the pithy venture capitalist at AngelList, put it:

Facebook just announced at its F8 developer conference that it’s opening up access to Facebook Live, and the first standalone camera that can directly integrate with the streaming service is Livestream’s Mevo.

Livestream announced the Mevo, its first consumer camera, back at CES. (It was called Movi then; the company presumably had to change it on account of Freefly’s Movi line of camera stabilizers.) It’s a small cylindrical camera with a wide angle that can shoot 4K video, but the power really comes from its software. The Mevo can split the 4K image into multiple (and separate) 1080p video feeds, and the accompanying app allows users to live edit between those feeds. It is essentially a low-budget replacement of a multi-camera live-streaming setup that fits in your pocket.

Apps like Vine, Instagram’s Boomerang, and Facebook’s MSQRD will soon have buttons that let them send videos you capture directly over to Facebook, where they’ll be put in place as your new profile image. Other apps will be able to support this too. “If you’re building a selfie cam app ... you can plug this in seamlessly to Facebook,” says Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer.

Facebook is calling its new tool the “profile expression kit,” and it’s being made available to developers of camera apps so that they can start adding this integration. It’s a small feature — most of these apps integrate with Facebook in one way or another already — but it’ll certainly make adding a profile video much easier than it’s been in the past and maybe even make more people aware that profile videos exist.

Mark Zuckerberg is optimistic about the future of virtual and augmented reality. At his Facebook F8 conference keynote, Zuckerberg said that the company was working on “a whole new set of social experiences” across VR platforms, echoing an announcement the company made earlier this year. “Virtual reality has the potential to be the most social platform, because you actually feel like you’re right there with another person,” he said, referencing an Oculus Rift “toybox” demo that lets two people play together in VR. But in the coming decade, Zuckerberg sees a progression that many people have predicted: that virtual reality will merge with augmented reality and become part of everyday life.

Palmer Luckey, inventor of the Oculus Rift headset that Facebook acquired in 2014, has previously predicted that augmented and virtual reality headsets will merge into a single piece of hardware that people carry around or wear like a pair of glasses. Granted, that’s going to be harder than it might sound. Right now, virtual and augmented reality headsets use fundamentally different visual technology, and it’s difficult for a pair of small glasses to block out the outside world the way a VR headset can.

Hoping to dramatically increase the amount of 360-degree video on its platform, Facebook today unveiled a reference design for a high-end video capture system and announced plans to release it as an open-source project on GitHub. Shaped like a flying saucer, Facebook Surround 360 uses a 17-camera array and accompanying web-based software to capture images in 360 degrees and render them automatically. Facebook says the design solves a variety of technical problems with 360-degree video capture better than anything now on the market, and is encouraging manufacturers and hobbyists to use its designs to build cameras of their own.

The rig includes 14 wide-angle cameras bolted onto the flying saucer, plus one fish-eye camera on top and two more on the bottom. This allows the device to capture the surroundings without showing the pole holding up the camera, a common problem here in the early days of 360-degree video. The cameras use what is known as a global shutter instead of a rolling one, which ensures the resulting footage does not display artifacts from the closing of individual shutters. In a brief demonstration Monday at Facebook headquarters, video captured through Surround 360 appeared to be crisp and seamless, with no flaws visible in the footage. (On the other hand, Samsung Gear VR, which I used to watch the demo, remains a grainy and sub-optimal way to view this type of footage.)

At the annual F8 developer conference today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be releasing an API for its live-streaming video feature. This will allow developers to build live Facebook video right into their apps. To demonstrate, Facebook showed off a DJI drone, live-streaming an aerial shot of Zuckerberg directly to the social network. It briefly hovered onstage next to the social network’s founder and chief, who waved nervously before wishing the aerial robot goodbye.

DJI introduced live-streaming to its drones in the summer of 2015 with the release of the Phantom 3. But that capability only worked with YouTube and and its Chinese equivalent, Youku. Pilots will now have a third option, and it will be a platform with a massive and rapacious audience. Facebook has been pushing live video into people’s news feeds, and streams from publishers and celebrities have been getting hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers and tens of millions of total views.

Every social network eventually becomes home to screenshots: important nuggets of textual wisdom that, for whatever reason, are more convenient to capture as an image than they are to transcribe and post elsewhere. The practice is particularly popular on Twitter, where BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan christened them “screenshorts” — a way of highlighting text that gets around Twitter’s 140-character limit. Facebook is much more generous on that front — you can post updates of more than 60,000 characters there — but the company still sees plenty of screenshots anyway. Today it’s introducing quote sharing, a feature developers can use to enable native sharing of quotes from their apps onto Facebook itself.

Publishers now have access to a tool that lets them build “share quote” buttons directly into their web pages and apps. That way, whenever a user highlights text on the page, a “share quote” button with the Facebook logo pops up. In light of the rest of today’s news, quote sharing looks relatively minor. But in a world where people are sharing to Facebook less, it represents a new way for people to post to the site — and for publishers to drive traffic back to their pages.

In October 2014, Twitter introduced Digits, a way for developers to sign up users with just a phone number. Particularly in developing countries, where some users may not have email addresses, a phone number-based login can spur rapid growth. As an added benefit, it avoids most of the pitfalls associated with password-based logins — it’s much harder to steal a phone number than it is a password. Digits is part of Fabric, Twitter’s suite of developer tools, which announced last week that it is now running on 2 billion devices. Maybe that’s why Facebook copied it. Say hello to Facebook Accounts!

Accounts, which were introduced on stage at today’s F8 developer conference, represent a significant expansion of the familiar “log in with Facebook” button. Apps that enable logins with Accounts ask you for your phone number. Once you send it, Facebook sends you a code to confirm the number belongs to you. Enter the code and you’re now logged into the app, with no password to remember. “People tell us that they hate passwords,” says Eddie O’Neil, a product manager at Facebook.

It’s been almost four years since Facebook introduced “save for later,” a way for storing articles, videos, and other things you find in the service in a dedicated part of the app. But your list of saved items has never had a prominent place in Facebook’s apps — to access it, you must first tap the dreaded “more” button, then scroll halfway down the list of options. And yet despite its relative obscurity, Facebook says 250 million people take advantage of the save feature every month — and the company has a new strategy to make that number grow.

Today at the F8 developer conference, Facebook is introducing a Save to Facebook button for the web. Publishers can now add the button to their standard article templates, and whenever a user taps the button, it will save the article or video directly to their Facebook queue. If that sounds a lot like Pocket and Instapaper, well, it is — it’s just baked into one of the most popular apps in the world. There are key differences, though — unlike Pocket and Instapaper, Facebook doesn’t strip articles of their formatting and advertisements. Given the high percentage of traffic that many publishers derive from Facebook, the company may have more success in getting them to add a “Save to Facebook” button than Pocket, which offers a similar button of its own.

Facebook’s Messenger app was the company’s fastest-growing platform in 2015, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said earlier today at the annual F8 developers conference, and is the second most popular app on iOS globally, just behind Facebook.

At last year’s F8, Facebook Messenger was said to have 700 million monthly active users. In January, that number hit 800 million. Now, a few months later, it has ballooned to 900 million monthly users.

The bot era has officially begun. In a widely expected move, Facebook today announced tools for developers to build bots inside Facebook Messenger, bringing a range of new functions to the popular communication app. Facebook believes Messenger can become a primary channel for businesses to interact with their customers, replacing 1-800 numbers with a mix of artificial intelligence and human intervention. If they are embraced by the general public — which is still far from certain — bots could represent a major new channel for commerce, customer support, and possibly even media.

The tools announced today include an API that allows developers to build chat bots for Messenger and chat widgets for the web. Much of the focus during demonstrations at the company’s F8 developer conference was on commerce. But the bot platform is also open to media, allowing publishers to message subscribers directly with news and other information. In a demonstration at today’s F8 developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed bots from CNN and 1-800-FLOWERS. The CNN bot sent news stories that became personalized over time; the flowers demo showed an interaction where a person ordered flowers using conversational language. “You never have to call 1-800-FLOWERS again,” Zuckerberg said.

Mark Zuckerberg gave an impassioned opening speech at Facebook’s F8 developer conference keynote today, lambasting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters for fostering a culture of fear in the US. Though he did not name Trump directly, Zuckerberg referenced the candidate’s position on immigration and the infamous call to build a wall between the US and Mexico. The Facebook CEO says fighting against this mentality is an integral part of his company’s 10-year roadmap to “connect the world.”

Of course, Zuckerberg wasn’t just taking aim at Trump. He was calling out oppressive regimes who crack down on social networking tools like Facebook, and governments who wield access to the internet as a weapon against dissidents. Yet his comments about the current atmosphere surrounding the US presidential race were the most pointed. It was quite clear in these first few minutes whom the executive was speaking about without naming names.