On its annual F8 Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Facebook announced several updates to be expected for its ‘ecosystem’. The company seems to be making massive moves in invading the overall web experience by integrating almost everything on it. The announcements clearly show how the company aspires to become a miniature of the entire Internet.
Here are ten things from F8 that will most likely impact Facebook and the overall Web:
The biggest upgrade made is turning Facebook Messenger into a separate platform. The app that used to be a simple messaging feature for Facebook is being upgraded allowing users to share photos, audio clips, videos, animated snippets and other digital content in what has the potential to tread on turf long dominated by Google-owned YouTube.
Despite having 600 million users, Facebook Messenger is still behind its competitor WhatsApp, but through the service upgrade 40 different apps will be integrated on the platform which will rolled out in the next few days.
One of the Messenger upgrades was designed to build on Facebook’s move into e-commerce by weaving chat threads into purchases at websites, essentially turning formerly impersonal Internet shopping into ongoing text message conversations.
The e-commerce move comes a week after Facebook unveiled a way to use Messenger for peer-to-peer payments, and with the social network testing a “buy” button to allow users to make purchases directly from their Facebook pages.
Through this, users can directly chat businesses for purchases and ask questions about a product and make changes about the order.
This is a major update for the comment section, and it actually came late. Users used to complain about the hardship on sighting the comment they’ve made or they’ve been tagged because others have already bet it up. Aside from making the comments real time, the replies will also sync with the shared post on the user’s Facebook making engagement between users and publishers easier. This feature is being rolled out as a beta first, with just six publishers including BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.
This feature will be of great competition with Youtube, as Facebook announced that videos uploaded to the network could now be embedded around the Web. Before, videos cannot be embedded without embedding the whole post, which is kind of awkward. This feature is only able to videos on Public setting and will be very helpful to journalists and publishers for posting Facebook videos on their websites.
The company purchased Oculus VR (the creators of the Oculus Rift) in bringing the ‘Spherical video’ which are filmed from multiple cameras and allow users to look around in a video clip. These videos will be accessible on the news feed and users can interact with them using mouse, and of course Virtual Reality devices. This move shows a wonderful integration in the once-supposed-impossible merging.
With the new share sheet, users will be able to tag their Facebook friends or share to Facebook Messenger groups without leaving the third-party app they are using. This way the apps can be integrated to offer a better sharing experience.
By placing the app invites in a dedicated section instead in the News Feed, app developers can promote their apps better. App Invites hopes to “help people share apps more seamlessly, while driving installs” for developers.
Through this anticipated platform called Parse, Internet of Things (IoT) can be possible. It’s still hard to finalize whether this plan will work, but this simple shows how Facebook is trying to invest in technology that will help survive and remain useful even when the social network disappears.
This feature is a free toll that reportedly will allow developers to understand how people are using their apps across devices. This same tool can also be used to measure effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Since Facebook is undeniably an ad-supported service, it will most likely be that the company will focus on this aspect a lot. This LiveRaid ad exchange feature will allow developers (and Facebook) to make money off mobile display ads.
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