Facebook announced its second F8 Developer event earlier today, to be held in San Francisco on July 23, 2008.
It’ll be hard for them to top last year’s announcement of Facebook Platform at the first F8 event. Facebook Platform transformed the idea of social networking from an activity to a platform to engage users. MySpace’s Platform, Google Open Social, and even Yahoo’s new feel-good social strategy can all be linked back to that single event.
What will Facebook launch this year? I don’t know yet, but look for them to expand their open source offering, push the new profile product, and, I’m sure, have at least one new major announcement. There may even be a little celebrating over their new status as the largest social network in the world.
Update: We’ve been informed that Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin has said Facebook will launch Facebook Connect at F8 this year, although this has yet to be confirmed by the company. Its launch would certainly make sense given its intention to essentially extend the app platform into the broader web. Facebook may very well have been saving the initial announcement of Connect for F8 until MySpace surprised them.
Go pick some ideas from the DataPortability Project, which advocates “Connect. Control. Share. Remix.”
So, let’s say, Facebook Control? that should be interesting…
Or, turn every pc/cellphone into a Facebook node.. call it Facebook Mesh!
Firefox would want to do it at browser level but will eventually screw it up badly by their usual standard of lousy performance.
Facebook should take that up directly, or along with Microsoft — seriously!
I think they would make the new revamped interface they have been working on public.
They should open source the whole thing.
That would radical.
Last year’s conference was awesome, I had a great time. The highlight of the event for me was Max Levchin on stage, promoting a Slide-Facebook partnership. He then attempted a joke, an Office Space reference. Nobody laughed.
He was incredulous that there were no Office Space fans in the audience.
All observations about Max’s charisma aside, I have nothing of pith to say.
Third party application development is really adding to all the fun in Web 2.0.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Google Checkout killer?
I’m going to guess it’s a new payment platform. FB needs to make more money off the platform besides what they get incidentally because it makes people spend more time on the site. Making themselves middlemen (or women?) to potential app transactions could be huge.
I would also bet heavily that they will introduce more features designed to filter out useless or malicious or spammy apps.
I don’t think you can do anything bigger than creating a platform. Thus, the announcements at F8 will most likely be about useful but mostly incremental improvements.
That’s just my guess.
Yahoo and Google (YoGo) have enough worries before - they dont want this
They should open source the whole thing.
Why wouldnt they release an iphone app? You would think they have to make an iphone app… but the dev conference is after the iphone release date… so they probably wouldnt launch the iphone app at the dev conference.
Am I the only one that thinks a facebook iphone app with location would be amazing?
Facebook hasn’t found a way to streamline their services and digitally converge their platform. Facebook began as a service purely for social networking. They’ve tried to adapt their offerings in the past 2 years in hopes of building their revenue streams. Facebook has a large user based but it will be doomed when a new generation of completely digital convergent platforms arise incorporating content, community, commerce, and content in a streamlined, all inclusive design. One you are “known” for a particular product or service, it can be hard to change the focus of your company from the consumer perspective. Check out this below…
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog
theres plenty happening with FB all the time, the recent open-sourcing being one of the most major initiatives
My money is on:
1. Launching a payments system
2. Going public with the new design (http://www.new.facebook.com/)
3. More open source/platform news
4. Possibly a location aware iPhone app (http://iphone.facebook.com/)