Mike Isaac

Recent Posts by Mike Isaac

Sorry, Developers: Don’t Expect Facebook’s F8 Conference This Year

Last year around this time, Facebook was gearing up for F8, the social giant’s conference in San Francisco to address the thousands of developers creating applications and Web sites that work with Facebook’s ecosystem. Think of it as Facebook’s version of Apple WWDC or Google I/O.

Don’t book your flights to the Bay Area just yet — Facebook won’t be putting on F8 this year, the company confirmed in a recent roundtable with reporters.

The reasoning: F8 is most often the premier event for introducing large changes to the way Facebook functions. This year, the company probably just doesn’t have any massive new products or features that would warrant calling in developers from across the world.

In 2008, for example, Facebook introduced the Connect platform for third-party sites, while last year’s event brought with it a major development in integrating with outsiders — Open Graph.

It’s also not a conference that occurs like clockwork annually (like Apple’s or Google’s have in recent years). Facebook has put on four F8 events in five years, sometimes spaced as much as 16 months apart.

Still, in the company’s every public pitch over the past six months, the message to developers is clear: We want you to integrate your mobile apps with Facebook. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s main talking point on the company’s first earnings call, and Zuckerberg again made it clear how important mobile and third-party developers are to Facebook in his most recent appearance at TechCrunch’s Disrupt technology conference earlier this month.

The biggest bummer about no F8? No chance of another awesome Zuck impression from Andy Samberg.

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