Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage on Tuesday at the company’s F8 developers conference to kick off the event with a major look into the future and a very cool surprise for attendees.
But before he dived into tech, Zuck doubled down on comments he made in recent weeks, lightly touching on issue of immigration and even taking a very veiled swipe at GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
But even that moment was fairly harmless, as his message mostly focused on a message of bringing the planet together and connecting all the people in it, one at a time.
To that end, Zuckerberg then unveiled Facebook’s grand 10-year plan.
Back in the boom time of the ’80s, when Japan was on the rise, U.S. business leaders often touted how Japanese businesses planned decades and even centuries ahead, rather than for the short term, like Western companies. But since the rise of the tech sector’s rapid innovation cycle, such thinking has largely fallen by the wayside, with two quarters representing an eternity in Internet years. (Although some Japanese companies still boast a 300-year plan.)
Apparently Zuckerberg, with an increasingly international bent largely focused on Asia, wants Facebook to think more long-term than most Silicon Valley startups.
Facebook’s 10-year roadmap emphasizes its overall ecosystem in the first three years, products such as video, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Groups and Search through year five, and technologies including connectivity (drones, satellites, etc.), A.I. and VR and AR through year 10.
Although it might sound ambitious, the company has already laid the groundwork to execute its plan, and that’s what the rest of the presentation outlined.
Messenger Bots
What received the most attention during the presentation was Facebook’s plan to make bots a seamless and vital part of the Messenger experience. According to Zuckerberg, Messenger is the fastest-growing app in the U.S., with 900 million users who send roughly 60 billion messages per day.
Fronted by a slick commercial, Zuckerberg’s Messenger team showed off a few of the bots that will live in the service. Poncho the Weather Cat is a bot that gives you the daily forecast in a conversational way. They also showed off a bot for 1-800-Flowers that eliminates the need to call for an order or even open an app and instead allows you to text what you want.
“We think that the combination of UI and conversation is what is going to make this work,” said David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging products.
Video
In the realm of video, Facebook announced its Live API that allows developers to build Facebook Live into devices or other apps. Zuckerberg even showed off one of the API’s launch partners, drone maker DJI. At Zuckerberg’s prompting, a drone flew onstage and streamed the surprised crowd live to Facebook.
According to Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, who also took to the stage, 70% of mobile traffic will be video by the year 2021, and Facebook clearly intends to successfully ride that shift to video.
Along those lines, Cox unveiled the first camera built expressly for Facebook Live called Mevo. Made by Livestream and formerly called the Movi, the tiny white camera fits in the palm of your hand and will be available for $399 this summer.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
Next to Messenger, the Facebook team seemed to have a virtual reality and augmented reality squarely in its sights as the next most important platform. In fact, Zuckerberg is so intent on pushing VR that he had his own Oprah moment and gave away free Samsung Gear VR headsets and phones to the entire audience.
During his presentation, Zuckerberg took a moment to envision what future VR and AR glasses will look like — basically, indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses.
But the biggest VR moment came when the company unveiled its Surround 360 camera. Housing 17 camera lenses, the camera can capture 360-degree video in 8K resolution, a tool that could make creating VR content for Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset easier for some. However, that will also depend on the camera’s price, which wasn’t revealed during the event.
– mashable