Here are some networking notes from Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week in San Jose, California:
- Facebook is fully invested in the Messenger platform.
- Businesses are using Messenger to handle 8 billion customer messagers per month
- Messenger is adding real-time translation between major languages
- Facebook has attracted over 200,000 independent developers for Messenger
- Facebook is adding Augmented Reality capabilities to Messenger and its bots
- Over 300,000 bots have been created for Messenger
- Facebook is also fully committed to WhatsApp, which has 450 million daily users.
- WhatsApp is the largest implementation of end-to-end encryption
- WhatsApp handles 65 billion messages per day, and these are not retained by the company.
- WhatsApp is handling 2 million minutes of voice/Video calling per day
- Group calling will soon be available on WhatsApp
- Facebook is adding Augmented Reality features to Instagram.
- Instagram is adding video chat.
- Facebook began selling a standalone VR headset for $199.
Materials from the event are posted here: https://www.f8.com/