Everything Facebook Announced at F8 in a Bulleted List

Facebook’s annual developer conference is happening right now and considering the current climate regarding Facebook’s data and privacy concerns, it was bound to be an interesting one for sure.

For those that don’t feel like watching the entire Keynote (knock yourself out here if you do), I put together a quick bulleted list of what was announced. Here are the biggest things that were announced.

• FaceDate: This sounded like a joke to me based on the name at first, but nope, it’s real. Facebook is starting a dating app on Facebook that allows you to create a profile only visible to non-friends (with only your first name) that can be used to find potential dates. Facebook uses your mutual friends, interests, etc. to match you. You can go through people’s photos and start a conversation in a messaging app that is separate from Messenger and Whatsapp. PS. Tinder’s stock just dropped 17 percent. Whoops.
• Clear History: Next, we have to talk about Zuckerberg’s new feature that supposedly will allow you to see and clear data that apps have on you from Facebook. The Facebook CEO likened it to clearing your cookie and history data from your browser. He also said that you can stop apps from collecting your data but that aggregate data would still be collected.
• Oculus Go: Facebook finally launched the standalone VR headset. It starts at $199 for a 32GB storage version (wondering if I should do a video on it, let me know guys).
• Oculus TV: Starting with Facebook Watch available, Netflix and Hulu should launch “soon”, as well. It puts a massive 2D screen in the 3D world with the Oculus Go to give you more reasons to use it, I guess.
• Instagram Video Chat: Instagram will now have video chat in direct messages. I think that’s pretty self-explanatory. Moving on.
• Messenger Gets Translations Built-In: Starting with Spanish/English translations with more languages to come, you can automatically translate messages in Messenger.
• 3D Photos and VR Memories: Facebook didn’t give too many details on these but they said they will soon support 3D images in the news feed and a new feature they want to allow you to virtually experience photos in 3D. It seems like it’ll use machine learning to create 3D versions of photos basically.
• Share to Instagram Stories from Other Apps: Beginning with GoPro, Spotify, and Soundcloud with more to come, you can share directly to Instagram Stories from within those apps. You could, of course, always have just grabbed a screenshot and then shared that to Instagram Stories I feel like, but okay. Good to see them opening that up though and it might get more interesting depending on the other apps allowed to do this. PS. You can share to Facebook Stories, too, but who cares.
• Reopening of the App Review Process: Facebook abruptly halted it’s app-review process and shut down its API in some ways following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but today announced they’re beginning to reopen it. This is good news to developers who use Facebook API data in their apps (I’m hoping it’ll get fixed some issues I personally have with apps that help me manage my social networks that stopped working, as well, but not holding my breath).

There you go guys, hope that was useful and better than watching the keynote 🙂

Let me know what you guys think of the Facebook data issues and if you think these help along with if you’re excited about any of this regardless in the comments.

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