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

Facebook Messenger’s David Marcus on the rocky rollout of bots

2016-04-18T08:00:03-04:00

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:

2014: br …

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The Livestream Mevo is the first camera that works with Facebook Live

2016-04-12T16:26:33-04:00

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 l …

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Facebook will let Vine and other apps shoot video profile pictures

2016-04-12T14:41:29-04:00

Facebook is making it easier to replace your profile photo with a profile video. It began allowing people to use a seven-second video in place of a profile photo last year, and now Facebook is rolling out a tool that'll allow video apps to make one for you.

Boomerang and MSQRD will also add support

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, …

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Mark Zuckerberg says augmented reality glasses are ‘what we’re trying to get to’

2016-04-12T14:22:40-04:00

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 aug …

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This is Facebook’s gorgeous, open-source 360-degree video camera

2016-04-12T13:50:07-04:00

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 inclu …

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Facebook will now let any camera stream to Facebook Live, even a DJI drone

2016-04-12T13:48:13-04:00

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 YouTu …

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You can now share quoted text directly to Facebook

2016-04-12T13:35:36-04:00

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 sh …

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Facebook’s new login tool lets developers sign up users with just a phone number

2016-04-12T13:35:14-04:00

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 tod …

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Facebook’s buried Save feature has 250 million users a month, and a new button to help it spread

2016-04-12T13:33:59-04:00

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 …

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Messenger and WhatsApp process 60 billion messages a day, three times more than SMS

2016-04-12T13:25:06-04:00

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.

Given the growing popularity and widespread use of messaging apps globally, that stat isn't totally surprising, but it's notable that the growth Messenger outpaced other Facebook properties like WhatsApp …

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