F8 – Developers Conference

What are the latest updates from the F8 Facebook Developer Conference 2018

The F8 Facebook conference for Developers opened with a Keynote from the company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. Lately, the company has been in the focus of attention because of the privacy data scandal. It was no surprise that this conference would be one of the most watched and popular events of the year.

On the second day of F8, the presentation starts off with talk about AI and how important it is for automatically identifying specific types of content, especially if it’s harmful.

One big area of focus for Facebook’s AI is computer vision. The company is trying to learn how to recognize people and objects in the real world. The demo shows the difference between last year’s tech and this year’s. The 2018 version is a lot smoother with a much higher framerate.

The 5 biggest announcements from Facebook’s F8 developer conference keynote

Facebook just wrapped day one of its F8 developer conference keynote, which comes at an unfortunate time this year after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal seems to have put Facebook at odds with how it is handling user data within its developer community. Nevertheless, the show had to go on, and Mark Zuckerberg tried his best to keep developers excited about continuing to build on his platform.

The CEO spent a brief moment of the keynote rallying developers to keep building and using their skills to bring people together. To do so, the company unveiled several updates coming to its product lineup, including the core Facebook app, Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp.

It was no surprise that this conference would be one of the most watched and popular events of the year.

1. VIDEO CHAT

2. EXPLORE

3. AR CAMARA EFFECTS

4. BULLY FILTER – Data Privacy

5. OCULUS

Face Date

One of the biggest excitements of the conference was the announcements of the Face Date feature of the social network. Yes, Facebook will be also a dating website now – this time officially. The new feature will allow users who are interested in dating to opt-in and will not post anything about their partner search on their profiles. The idea is that anyone who is interested in dating can network in a separate group without interfering with the other users. Conversations on the dating platform will be in a separate box – nether Messenger, not WhatsApp.

Facebook has a great advantage to traditional dating apps. Once people get together, they will not leave Facebook. They can simply opt out of their dating profile and continue using the platform like everyone else does. The question is whether the feature has been done so it does not interfere with the experience of the people who are not interested in a dating website.

Facebook is already a combination of several services you use online — Facebook Marketplace is to Craigslist as Stories is to Snapchat — and now it appears the social network is coming after Tinder next.

Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will soon offer a dating feature that allows people to browse potential matches at inside groups or events you’re interested in attending. The feature will allow people to message each other using only their first names, and start conversations that are separate from the core Facebook or Messenger app.

Facebook did not say when the feature will launch, but just minutes after the announcement, Tinder and OkCupid parent company Match Group saw its stock plummet as low as 20 percent from $46.22 to $36.12 per share at the time this article published.

Clear information history

This was one of the most interesting announcements from the Facebook Conference for Developers. Users will now be allowed to clear any data Facebook has stored about them from other apps and websites they have interacted with. This coincided with a message on Facebook Business Manager that ads will no longer be able to target by information gathered from a third-party source.

An upcoming feature will let you wipe the data Facebook has learned about you as it tracks your activities on the web.

The first big new tool is a user tool called Clear History. You can see information gathered from Facebook integration onto other sites, including apps and websites that use Facebook’s ads. Zuckerberg says “we’re building this,” but doesn’t offer a date for it to roll out. He does, however, say that you can turn off that tracking forever once you clear it. It will be limited at first. Gut reaction is that this is a little unclear about whether or not this is all the data Facebook has about you.

Back in 2017 when we first started using Facebook ads we were astonished by the amount of detail by which the platform could segment users. One of the features which will no longer be available is targeting by income. This data was bought by Facebook from providers like Acxicom and Experian. The income targeting was not available for all countries but from now on it will disappear from the targeting options.

AI – Artificial Intelligence to fight bullies and offensive language

The company’s Chief Technical Officer, Mike Schroepfer, opened the second day of the Facebook Conference for Developers with a talk about some of the problems the platform is facing. Bullying, offensive language, hate speech, and fake news are just some of the issues Facebook has been dealing with. He made it clear that tackling these types of negative behavior is already a big priority. And as in the past Facebook relied on reports by users, now the majority of the negative messages are caught by AI much earlier before they are seen by the users.

The artificial technology recognizes offensive and pornographic pictures, but it still must perfect recognition of some speech expression nuances. One of the key focuses has been making Instagram a safer environment. Only in the last year millions of terrorist propaganda posts have been detected and blocked by AI before reaching anyone’s feed, declared Schoepher.

Messenger Augmented and Virtual Reality Ads

Messenger is getting more simplified and the direction is towards cleaner design and language translation. The translation feature will first become available for English-Spanish in the U.S. marketplace feature.

Some other exciting features of Messenger will include ads in messenger which use augmented and virtual reality. For example – you can send a lipstick ad to young female demographic on Messenger. The ad allows them to try and choose a lipstick color by opening their camera in selfie mode. Some of the companies to launch this ad experience are Sephora, ASUS, Kia and Nike. Asus is planning to show unboxing experience through augmented reality. Nike’s ad is going to show a pair of snickers in a message which will open a curated “red carpet” experience.

Facebook has already admitted that it’s allowed Messenger to become extremely bloated after unbundling it from the core Facebook app, and now, it looks to be simplifying — at least visually. Messenger VP of product David Marcus says the overall refresh is focused on making things cleaner and faster, with an upcoming dark mode teased in a short promotional video.

VR -Virtual Reality Photos in the Newsfeed

And if virtual reality is available for ads, then it should be also for photo sharing. A new feature will allow transforming old photos into a 3D point cloud models. Facebook’s VR head set Oculus Go is also going to hit the market at highly affordable prices. They will not require the use of a mobile phone. This will make the experience much more fluent and independent from the mobile phone capabilities.

Oculus TV will allow watching TV in a virtual reality. At first it will use Facebook TV, Redbull Watch and Pluto TV. The app puts a TV experience into your virtual environment with specially adapted on-screen controls, which essentially turn the virtual screen in the virtual room into a sort of Chromecast or Apple TV-like experience. Soon Netflix and Hulu are likely to allow VR experiences, too.

Oculus Go

The $199 standalone virtual reality headset from Facebook is now available for purchase  after Amazon accidentally put preorders up hours before the official launch. The new Oculus Go will support social experiences like Watch Party, multiplayer games, and even live shows such as concerts and theater.

In addition to the headset, there will now be an Oculus TV hub for users to stream content from ESPN, Netflix, Showtime, and more. Some of these services have been available via Hulu for some time, but the new hub should add more options for those investing in the new headset.

All-in on Instagram Stories

Most of the updates for Instagram today arrive to the app’s most popular feature to date: Stories. Soon, users will be able to user AR face filters from brands and influencers without waiting for Instagram to release its own. Users will also get more third-party integrations when uploading a story. For example, a GoPro clip could be cropped and ported right to Instagram Stories or you can share what you’re currently listening to on Spotify while offering a deep link within a story to open that song in a viewer’s own Spotify app.

Instagram is also continuing to transform into a full-fledged messaging app, with new video calling features that will allow group conferencing as well.

WhatsApp gets a few updates, too

After a moment of thanking WhatsApp founder Jan Koum in regards to his recent departure, Facebook moved right into sharing stories about how impactful WhatsApp has been around the world. The Stories feature also appears to be taking off well on WhatsApp: Facebook revealed that 450 million users share a story on WhatsApp daily. Additionally, 65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp every day.

While WhatsApp is not getting a refresh quite as dramatic as Messenger, it will be receiving a few minor updates such as group video calls and stickers. Features targeted at businesses are to come, though the company did not outline specifically what during the keynote.

Groups

Zuckerberg says that Groups will become a larger part of the Facebook experience. There will soon be a “join group” button that creators can use in order to build on the community. So, you can put the button on web pages and in emails. You can be friends with more #brands on Facebook.

Safety Check

Now, in addition to the “check in” features, Facebook allows for “First Party Accounts,” from people who are in the area of a natural disaster. So, they can share updates about things like traffic or conditions. It’s a roundabout way for Facebook to prioritize information that’s coming from people directly in the affected area.

DensePose

DensePose is Facebook’s system for recognizing multiple, three-dimensional people, even if they’re moving.

The next step after vision is recognizing language. Facebook has a new system called MUSE (Multilingual Unsupervised and Supervised Embeddings) for understanding natural language. This all seems very odd when you consider that Facebook doesn’t have a consumer-facing virtual assistant yet.

Facebook made an AI bot that plays the game Go, which is an increasingly common test for AI intelligence. You can download the bot here and play against it or use its learning tech in research.

Reopening the App

Review ProcessFacebook will re-open its app review process subsequent the break it took following the Cambridge Analytica crisis and this will be welcome news for developers.

StellarEmploy

StellarEmploy makes use of deep learning algorithms in order to match employee presentation to job essentials, allowing companies to employ hourly employees that will like and do a great job.

PyTorch 1.0 for both research and production

PyTorch 1.0 will be available in beta within the next few months, and will include a family of tools, libraries, pre-trained models, and datasets for each stage of development, enabling the community to quickly create and deploy new AI innovations at scale.

ONNX V1 released

Support for ONNX is available now in many top frameworks and runtimes including Caffe2, Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit, Apache MXNet, PyTorch and NVIDIA’s TensorRT. We also have community contributed converters for other projects such as TensorFlow. The current version of ONNX is design to work for most vision applications. For future versions, we are working together with ONNX partners and community to expand ONNX to represent scenarios beyond vision, including more dynamic models that occur in areas like language modeling. We hope others will get involved, contribute and help grow the ONNX ecosystem.

3D Posts

Create immersive 3D posts and content for the Facebook News Feed.

Facebook 360

Create & share immersive stories, places and experiences.

Oculus

Create compelling VR experiences and reach passionate VR audiences.

Quill

A VR illusion and animation tool built to help empower artists & creators.

React 360

Use web tech to create content for audiences across mobile, web and VR.

Group Plugin

Grow and engage your communities on Facebook.

Instagram

Tools to help businesses manage their presence on Instagram.

Sharing on Facebook

Let people share your app or site content in the moment across platforms.

Social Plugins

A way to make your app or website social

Sharing Stories

Tap into the power of Stories, and make it easy for people to share everyday moments from your app to Instagram.

Sharing to Feed

Let people share their daily highlights from your app to their Instagram Feed.

Camera Effects Platform for Instagram

By tapping into Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform, we’re unlocking the ability for artists, celebrities, creators and brands to develop a range of creative tools designed with their followers in mind. The Camera Effects Platform for Instagram is currently in a closed beta.

Instagram API

Mentions API

Business Discovery API

Insights API

Comment Moderation API

New! Stories make sharing fun and simple- let people share your site content in the moment across platforms.

What GDPR means for brands…

Today Facebook announced they took down 583 million fake accounts-

Facebook also gave a breakdown of how much other undesirable content it removed during Q1 2018, as well as how much of it was flagged by its systems or reported by users:

21 million pieces of content depicting inappropriate adult nudity and sexual activity were taken down, 96 percent of which were first flagged by Facebook’s tools.

3.5 million pieces of violent content were taken down or slapped with a warning label, 86 percent of which were flagged by Facebook’s tools.

2.5 million pieces of hate speech were taken down, 38 percent of which were flagged by Facebook’s tools.