Name: These Are the Biggest Changes Facebook Introduced at its F8 Conference
Uploaded: 2016-04-13
Duration: 3 min 30 s
Description: From virtual reality to artificial intelligence

F8, Facebook's developer conference, has come to a close. Erin, was it a boom or a bust? It was a boom. They introduced a lot of really cool stuff. The problem with these developer conferences, whether it's Google or Apple or Facebook, is that It's not really clear how this news affects consumers. Because right now they're trying to rally developers to get them to build things on their various platforms. One thing that they announced that will definitely affect consumers in the near term is the introduction of bots into Facebook Messenger. This is their messaging app that has 800 million users. And now those 800 million users can chat with an artificially intelligent Chatbot, from a business or a brand. I love talking to brands. [ LAUGH ] Right, and so it's a little bit maybe not clear why you would want to be chatting with the equivalent of Clippy from any of their new bot partners. Silly bots really aren't very smart they're pretty rudimentary at this point but I think that this has a potential to replace the 1- 800 number and a year from now we're all going to be hailing the bots as the most convenient way to interact with businesses. Well, for me this year's F8 was a little bit of bust and the reason is because all the technology was kind of out there. None of it was really impacting my experience of Facebook right now, right? So. For example, Facebook introduced a 360 degree camera. And the idea is to create 360 degree video to then put on Facebook. Now, we know that video's been a big deal for Facebook, Facebook Live has been kind of a feather in its cap this year, but I don't really see what value, besides novelty, this is gonna add. I mean, I'm not gonna go to Facebook To watch 360 degree video, ti's not really going to change my habits, and it was just a little bit of a head scratcher. Well that's the problem. You're going to go there and you're going to end up watching it anyways. People go to Facebook not knowing what they want to find and then just finding things to consume. That's why people are finding so many news articles on [ UNKNOWN ] and in fact They spoke yesterday, announced that they're expanding their instant articles program. So that way any publisher can participate in it. This was a little bit controversial because publishers are scared of handing over so much power to Facebook. But they've also introduced new ways for publishers to make money on instant articles. So this has got a lot of people, all the way down to the very smallest publishers are excited about this opportunity. There was one thing I was kind of excited about with this year's F8. I mean it was all about what Facebook announced on day two which was artificial intelligence, machine learning. The company's doing a lot of work in this area. Some of it's really research based and far off. But some of it's not and It kind of pulled the veil back a little bit to show us how it was using this technology to you know display items in our feed, and display appropriate ads and so forth. And what's it's doing is really cool far out stuff, but I wonder does it apply to anybody else except Facebook. Machine learning technologies are kind of notorious for being application specific. I don't know how much impact it's going to have. Well, anything that's [ UNKNOWN ] does will have a huge impact because the company has 1. 6 billion monthly active users, many, many of those are daily active users. And they now take up 20 % of the time that the average american spends on the internet if you include Facebook and instagram together. The company has massive scale, so any sort of new improvement that they have, any sort of underlying technology that they've built has the potential to have a really big impact .>> That's a fair point. For one show you can watch on Facebook and a lot of other place, come to fortune. com for more tech debate.

From virtual reality to artificial intelligence