F8 A World of Wonders

There will be a rash of posts that detail Facebook's roadmap.

It's not in every context that 'virtual and artificial' would be the basis of a compliment. If you add 'reality and intelligence' it gets better, much better.

At F8, Facebook's annual developer conference,  advances in the virtual and the artificial showed that Facebook has begun to thread the needle between science fiction and real world fact. These manifest most obviously in the consumer launch of Occulus, the continually brain scrambling 1.6 billion user personalized news feeds, natural language translation, computer vision for the sight impaired and the launch of learning chat bots in Messenger (bots are people too perhaps).

Alongside this the company showcased new connectivity projects that reduce urban data congestion via its Terragraph initiative and, in parallel, multiple initiatives to deliver 4G beating bandwidth to 96% of the world's population.

The infrastructure investment has created an ability to innovate at scale that encompasses Facebook Live Video and the remarkable morph of VR from an almost isolating to a completely social experience. This has potential far beyond gaming and entertainment through to never having to write the words 'wish you were' again. This is the beginning. What's next is the cracking of the elaborate unwritten social code of expression, prediction and visual cues  that define human behavior.

In other posts I have criticized Facebook and some of its peers for putting much of what it does in relation to its ad products behind walled gardens. I still think that; but I can't say the same about their engineering. Their commitment to open source and advancing the state of the art with partners as diverse as individual developers and Microsoft. This behavior is the basis of a sustainable and powerful corporate and technological ecosystem.

F8 is as close as the outsider gets to the inside of Facebook. The reality is fascinating and far from virtual.

@robnorman