Facebook Accidentally Leaked A Lot of Its Big F8 Announcements

Facebook CES Mark Zuckerberg delivers his keynote at the company’s annual F8 Developers Conference in 2011. (Via Reuters).

Someone in the Facebook headquarters has slippery fingers.

Early Wednesday morning, the company sent out a push alert through itsF8 conference app that mistakenly leaked some of the event’s major announcements. (Maybe they should have used Slingshot?) The message revealed Facebook’s plans to integrate with Internet-connected home devices and make its Messenger app a platform. It also referenced a mystery product called “Teleportation Station,” according toscreenshots published by TechCrunch.

A notification sent out via Facebook’s conference app in the wee hours of the morning. (Via TechCrunch).

The slip, which comes just hours before the social network’s 6th major developer’s conference on Wednesday morning, hints at several new areas of focus for the company. 

“Parse for IoT,” for instance, refers to a company that Facebook bought in 2013. Parse provides the core operational elements of an app, so that developers can build whatever pretty thing they want on top of that foundation. Facebook has apparently chosen to extend this paid service for anyone who wants to create Facebook-centric smart devices. We’ll likely hear more details of this program today, though it’s hard to imagine what business a smart coffee maker or Wi-Fi jump rope has in alerting you of a Facebook friend’s birthday.

The idea of Facebook Messenger as a platform, however mundane, may mean big things for the harried app. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine broke news of these rumors last week, explaining “Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChatand Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends.” Theoretically, non-Facebook entities will be able to build features that allow for their content and tools to be used directly within the app. This could mean anything from sleeker sharing of webpages to enhancedPusheen-like animations. Perhaps a new arsenal of capabilities will finally be enough to make people forget they were forced to use it in the first place. 

When it comes to the mysterious Teleportation Station, no one really knows what to expect. Several sites have surmised that this refers to new Facebook features on the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, which the company bought in a whopping $19 billion deal last March. It’d be appropriate for Mark Zuckerberg to show us how he’s put the gadget to use almost exactly a year after the mammoth purchase.

Facebook to revive f8 after three-year hiatus

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Facebook announced Saturday that it's bringing back its once-annual f8 developer conference. After taking a three-year break, the company will hold its next f8 event on April 30 at the San Francisco Design Concourse.

The one-day conference will be even more developer-focused than in years past, meaning it will be highly technical in nature and not likely to include any bombshell consumer-product reveals. Attendees can expect the company to pay extra attention to mobile-app development, an area of supreme significance for the company, especially following last year's acquisition of Parse.

The tone will be radically different from Facebook's previous f8 event, held in September 2011, where company CEO Mark Zuckerberg made splashy consumer announcements including its radical profile redo called Timeline and the now mostly defunct Ticker.

This time around, Facebook will kick of f8 with a keynote address from an unknown executive -- Zuckerberg is not a definite -- who could make announcements related to Parse, mobile-app ads, or even Facebook's fledglingmobile ad network. The social network said in January that it had started a small test with partner advertisers to show Facebook ads in their mobile apps. At the time, Facebook promised additional details in the months ahead.

"This year, we're going back to our roots and having a pure developer conference," Parse CEO Ilya Sukar said in a statement shared with CNET. "F8 will open with a morning keynote, followed by four tracks that will cover getting-started guides, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies, engineering deep dives, and advertising tips for making your app or game highly successful."

F8 will have room for 1,500 developers, who will have to apply for a spot to attend the conference, a company spokesperson told CNET. Facebook will announce registration details in the weeks ahead.