The annual Facebook Developers Conference, F8, was April 18th and the 19th in San Jose, CA. I rarely attend developers conferences since that is not my expertise but I always love reading the recaps. It always amazes me how many clever and innovative ideas, platforms, updates and new features that are either being developed or about to be launched for Facebook.

Since I was not there this year I don’t have a first person recap of the event but I have something better, a direct recap from Facebook by Yuji Higaki. Below is his recap for day one of F8 and I strongly suggest (if you’re interested) to watch some of their sessions as well.

Camera Effects Platform: The Camera Effects Platform turns smartphone cameras into the first augmented reality (AR) platform, providing an opportunity for artists and developers to create effects for the Facebook camera. Included with this new platform are two creative tools, Frame Studio and AR Studio, which give the Facebook community the power to create a full spectrum of camera effects, from simple frames to interactive AR experiences. This platform empowers artists and developers to connect art with data to bring AR into everyday life through the Facebook camera. Today, we are putting the power of augmented reality in developers’ hands.

Messenger Platform 2.0: A new suite of tools that gives you the ability to build better experiences in Messenger. Platform 2.0 highlights include:

• Discover: A new surface to help people intuitively browse and find the best bots, places and businesses in Messenger.
• Chat Extensions: This feature allows people to contextually bring a bot into a conversation and enable collaboration within a single bot session.
• Parametric Messenger Codes: Businesses can now generate multiple Messenger Codes for their bots and see which ones are being scanned the most.
• Smart Replies: Facebook Page admins can now turn on automatic replies powered by artificial intelligence.

Automated Insights for Facebook Analytics: Using advanced machine learning, Facebook Analytics now surfaces valuable insights to you automatically, helping you take action more quickly. With this new feature, we will surface insights in your dashboard, such as changes in purchase behavior over time or variations in engagement across people in different cities.

Identity: Facebook Login and Account Kit released product enhancements to help businesses better connect with people by expanding availability to more surfaces, offering more ways to verify information, and modernizing the Facebook Login buttons. We also introduced new solutions that help you maintain those connections, including a secure way to recover customer accounts by confirming their identity without the need to share personal information or passwords.

Developer Circles: Developer Circles is a community-driven program to share knowledge, collaborate, build new ideas, and learn about the latest technologies from Facebook and other industry leaders.

Facebook Games: Released new updates that help developers build and grow their games across mobile, desktop, and video platforms.

• Instant Games: Introducing rich gameplay features to give developers more control of the gaming experiences they offer. These features allow developers to build different types of experiences and utilize more screen space to incorporate things like Share & Connected Player APIs. Developers can post customized messages and create out-of-game features for players in Instant Games through game bots.
• Gameroom Platform SDK: Gameroom is Facebook’s new desktop gaming platform with more than one thousand titles with games from more than ten different categories. The new Gameroom Platform SDK gives developers the opportunity to bring their games onto this emerging PC game platform. Developers now have the flexibility to port games that are built in a variety of engines, including Unreal Engine, Cocos2d and more.
• Games tab: Rolling out a new games tab to make it even easier for players to discover games. Additionally, developers will be able to leverage game bots to create engaging ways for players to connect to their games through actions they take directly within a Messenger chat.

Places Graph: With free access to data on over 140 million places around the world, we created Search, Current Place, and Place Information endpoints. You can now find places relevant to your consumers and receive helpful information about each place. The Places Graph gives you free access to the same data that powers Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. We’ve tied query limits to your user base and integrated with the Facebook SDK so it’s easy to get started and scale quickly.

Graph API: A host of new features to enable you to build an even richer app experience, along with tools to make development easier, including:

• Enhanced URL Engagement Counts: We’ve expanded the types of engagement metrics you can view for any URL on the web. You can now view four distinct counts: reactions, comments, shares, and comments plugin.
• Webhooks: Facebook’s subscription-based push service for apps. We’ve added versioning so developers can opt-in to new Webhooks features as they become available.
• Read-After-Write API Calls: You no longer have to do a separate call to read an object after writing it.

Marketing API: Releasing v2.9 of the Marketing API with enhanced features for Ads Creation & Management, Dynamic Ads, and Targeting.

International Bug Support: Bug support is now available in multiple languages starting with Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. More languages coming soon.

The full keynote and all other sessions from F8 will be made available throughout the day to watch on VOD so make sure you continue to check back in to developers.facebook.com/videos.

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Source: Facebook, Facebook Developers, FBF8, Yuji Higaki