Facebook
has kickstarted F8, its annual developer conference. On Day 1, the
social network made a plethora of announcements. Some of these include
much talked about Facebook as a platform, Spherical video, LiveRail,
analytics for apps and Internet of things. Let’s take a look at them one
by one.
Messenger as platform
It
is already known that Facebook plans to announce some big changes for
its Messenger app. Facebook is now offering Messenger as a platform for
developers. This means, third party developers can now work on content
and information for the Messenger. It will allow third-party apps to
access the company’s Messenger service and plans tie-ups with about 20
different outfits.
Spherical video
Interestingly,
Facebook has introduced support for 3D, spherical video in the
newsfeed. Users will be able to pan around the video with their mouse
cursor. With this move, Facebook brings its VR abilities to the
newsfeed. While the spherical video doesn’t really make much difference
on your flat screen monitor, watching it using the VR headset will
ensure a 360 degrees spherical video feel as if you are right there.
LiveRail
In
mid-2014, Facebook acquired video advertising firm LiveRail to make
video ads a bigger part of its business, and now the company has started
implementing it. Basically, LiveRail fills ad space within apps and
sites to the highest bidder and now bring two big changes to Facebook.
Firstly, it will support mobile display ads along with video. Secondly,
it can now tap into Facebook data and display an appropriate ad.
Analytics for apps
Just
like its advertisers, Facebook now plans to bring details about app
usage to developers. The social network will now allow developers to
find out who is using their apps, whether most of their games are played
by a male or female, are these gamers teenagers and so on. The
analytics will also show who is spending money on games. The new
analytics platform is aimed at simplifying all this and more for app
developers.
Finally,
just like Google and Apple, Facebook wants to talk about its bit for
Internet of Things. The company has also announced Parse for ‘Internet
Of Things’ that is a set of SDKs which will help IoT projects.
Posted by : Gizmeon
No comments:
Post a Comment