On Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 April, the Facebook F8 Conference was held in San Francisco, the conference where all the latest developments for this platform are explained. Below is a selection of the most striking novelties.
Automated Chatbot
With the automated chatbot, consumers can talk to companies as they normally would with friends. Consumers can request information via a small message and the chatbot will then automatically provide an answer. The bots not only send back answers in the form of text, they can also send back images or links. Are you interested in a hotel room for tomorrow evening? With an app to your favorite hotel, they will automatically send you a personal offer.
Facebook Live
Facebook was already working on a small scale with the so-called “Facebook Live”; an option to stream live video. Facebook now offers third parties the opportunity to respond further to this. For example, MEVO comes with a camera with which you can record videos yourself and stream them directly via Facebook Live, including some nice editing options.
Flirting with Virtual Reality
Although Facebook itself has not really set its sights on Virtual Reality (yet), they do seem to be flirting with it a bit. Facebook has come up with a camera that has the functions to take the perfect 360 degree shot. Facebook will not offer the camera itself, but the video algorithms and construction drawings will. These will be available via GitHub around July 2016.
Instant Articles
Particularly interesting for publishers is the new way to unlock messages in Facebook. Articles can be displayed in a “native” way in Facebook, resulting in 20% more clicks on messages, 70% less chance that readers quickly leave the message and the whole results in 30% more shares.