Facebook Announces Messenger Platform & 10 Year Roadmap at F8

Mark Zuckerberg went on stage at F8 today and gave a very emotional keynote. His main opening message was: We need to connect people more, not less - he said: "We need to give more people a voice instead of building walls, we can help people build bridges”

Mark promised a view of a 10 year roadmap of Facebook (and delivered on it!), and shared the Facebook vision: "Give everyone a power to share anything with anyone.”. He went on to describe what it means everyone, anything, and anyone - and what each of these mean, and that he wants to help build, grow, and monetize your apps. And a big focus will clearly be Messenger. Messenger is quite amazing, Mark shared some amazing stats: WhatsApp+Messenger make 60B messages / day compared to SMS that do 20B messages / day. Pretty impressive, and that probably relates to the huge announcement!
From my point of view this is the biggest thing since the launch of the Facebook platform. 

What everyone has been expecting: Facebook Messenger Platform - Bot announcement
The biggest launch of the day is certainly the ecosystem around Messenger - the Messenger Platform. Initial partners seem to include: Uber, KLM, Spotify, Flipboard, Lyft, Zendesk, NBA, Zynga, Hearst, MLB. Mark showed an example of CNN news and how it can deliver you a deeper news experience, and 1-800-flowers and how you could order flowers with a few clicks.
David Markus went on stage to give more details on Messenger. 900M people use Messenger now.  Messenger also in the last year worked with content from amazing brands - Disney, Zynga, BuzzFeed, MLB, NBA, Spotify, Giphy, Imgur, Dropbox.

50M businesses are active on Facebook pages, 1B messages on messenger to businesses - and we have a beginning of the new platform out there. Today, Facebook launches the beta of the Messenger platform. Messenger is instant, persistent identity, in context, and canonical
The biggest announcement of the day is certainly the Facebook Messenger Platform Send/Receive API - which will be available this afternoon.

• All bots will preserve identity of all time
• Bots will be able to send and receive images, carousels, special bubbles, buttons, and calls to actions, and other templates 

The sample “Spring” shopping experience is coming later today as an example. People will be always in control - conversations are always started by people. Every thread has prominent experiences: Block all or specific messages from that bot. 

Discovery of bots will be very important:

• Discovery will include Messenger Plugins - Send to Messenger
• Usernames and Codes - business will also cave their “Messenger Codes” like people
• Search Discovery - you will be able to search these bots

Facebook will also launch customer matching - tool that enables opted-in customer phone numbers and connect them with messenger accounts. You will also be able to buy news feed ads on Facebook with calls to action in messenger.
David also talked about about “M” a bit - M is the early stage assistant. Using the intelligence from “M”, later today Facebook will launch wit.ai - the bot engine which can help developers build conversation bots. 

Other Announcements - Full overview

Another cool thing will be Facebook Live - Facebook Live was now scaled to all users on Facebook, and Facebook announced the LIVE API - the ability for any partner to stream videos via Facebook live, which will also be a tab in the Facebook experience. Well, what can we say? I guess what Periscope did to Meerkat (remember?), Facebook Live will just do to Periscope (as Twitter does not have that scale and its not a platform). Launch partners are pretty cool: MEVO, Vidpresso (overlaying live content), dji drones will have live capabilities.
Facebook released Account Kit - creates a framework over logging in and allows people to easily sign up as an additional layer over Facebook connect. Testing Account Kit with partners in 20 countries - Flipboard, Pinterest, etc. seem to be part of the pilot.

Facebook released the “Save to Facebook” button and updates around Facebook Analytics.

Chris Cox also talked about Messenger calling, Instagram, the growth of Instant Articles (which are taking over and are being open), and Canvas Ads. 
Today Facebook launched the Profile Expression Kit where you can create profile pics as a platform.

Also, Facebook announced Facebook Surround 360 camera - 8k in each eye, and Facebook will open source all hardware and software around it - well done Facebook. 

Last but not least - In the second part of his keynote, Mark talked about the focus moving forward 5-10 year roadmap: 

• Connectivity - Delta is 4.1B people - people that are offline
  • Availability - near network (1B people)
    • Launching 
  • Affordability (1B people)
    • Helping operators build cheaper infrastructure
  • Awareness - Data (2B people)
    • “Free Basics” - now connecting 25M people, helping them understand the value of the internet, now Facebook also launched a Free Basics simulator
• Artificial Intelligence
  • Building systems better at people with perception
  • Building cheaper more open source infrastructure
• Virtual reality - Oculus Rift
  • Connectivity via Oculus & Store
  • Augmented reality will be as small as glasses

Take a look at my earlier video that talks about use-cases of bots and bot stores:

To conclude, I believe these announcements - Facebook Messenger platform in particular are the biggest launch since the launch of the Facebook platform itself - and possibly much bigger, especially if they scale it to WhatsApp.

Google - your move.