F8 Reveals New Developer Tools & Services

More than 2,600 developers joined us today in San Francisco at F8, our annual global developer conference, to hear about the new technologies and tools Facebook is building to help build, grow and monetize apps.

Our community is more global than ever. Hundreds of thousands of developers are building with Facebook products, with more than 70% of them located outside the U.S. This year for F8, we've worked with over 70 developers from more than 15 countries to help us test and build the things we announced. It's energizing to see what everyone in our community has built and how they're changing people's lives all around the world.

We released many new products and services to address common problems developers face. We look forward to hearing what you think of our latest announcements, and continuing to grow our community together with what you build next.

Grow Your App and Scale your Business

Account Kit: Grow your apps by letting people quickly and easily log in using just your phone number or email address. People can register for apps without creating a new password, so you can increase engagement and growth by removing this major barrier to entry. It's a complementary solution to Facebook Login and does not require people to have a Facebook account.

Messenger Platform: Expanded access to the Messenger platform by giving you the ability to reach your customers where they already are with a new send and receive API. You will be able to build a custom bot in Messenger, providing anything from customer service to rich, interactive experiences such as automated responses or spawning a search.

Help People Share and Engage

Facebook Share: Multiple updates including new quote and hashtag sharing features that allow people to share new types of content, a revamped and more seamless sharing experience for mobile web, as well as improvements to our Sharing Debugger tool to help you build better shares.

Social Plugins: Launched a brand new Save plugin, along with fully redesigned embedded posts, the ability to embed new types of content like live videos and public comments from Facebook, and improvements to moderation tools for the Comments plugin. We also announced the Sharing Insights tool to help you measure whether you're successfully driving engagement via sharing.

Profile Expressions Kit: A new identity expression platform that includes profile pic frames for Pages and enables people to post a profile video from third party apps with one click .

Build Better

Graph API v2.6: A host of new features to enable you to build an even richer app experience, along with new tools to make development easier. These include:

• Reactions API to measure the total counts of all the reactions on your posts. This is a read-only API.
• Sharing for Devices brings the power of Facebook Share Dialogs to devices like TVs, set-top boxes, digital photo frames and Internet of Things devices.

Live API: Build the next generation of interactive live video apps and devices that publish directly to Facebook Live. Live API enables you to build apps and production tools that create a highly interactive live experience.

Marketing API: New Static Recommendations API helps prevent the creation of sub-optimal, under-performing ads by providing recommendations for advertisers. We also released a new Facebook Ads Java SDK and updates to the existing Python and PHP SDKs.

API Upgrade Tool: Automates the manual work involved in upgrading an app by showing a display of what API version your apps are currently calling, how those calls would behave with different API versions, and how your app might change as a result.

Localized Technical Documentation: Developer documentation for our most used products is now available in 16 languages.

Measure and Learn

Facebook Analytics for Apps: Enhancements such as deeper audience insights, push and in-app notifications (beta), powerful breakdowns, and an App Events Export API so you can analyze data offline.

Rate Limiting Tool: Learn when your app is approaching API rate limits and at risk of being throttled in order to reduce downtime for your app.

Improved App Dashboard: A revamped, more relevant dashboard now organized by the Facebook products used in your apps.

The full keynote and all other sessions from F8 will be made available throughout the day to watch on VOD so make sure you continue to check back in to developers.facebook.com/videos. You can also experience the rest of F8 by signing up to watch F8 live online for access to tomorrow's keynote, sessions and other exclusive content.