F8 : The Haj of Facebook

It's becoming harder to to think of Facebook as an ephemeral phenomena. The user bases of the Big Blue app, Messenger, Instagram and What's App put the business in a category of one and exhibit the appetite for self-disruption required for survival. Facebook touches more people for media time than any media company in history and collects all the data required to fuel its monetization strategy.

Two days at the Haj of Facebook, the F8 developers conference, gave insight into the dizzying heights of Facebook's corporate purpose and ambition. Connecting the people of the world in real time and to do that in the context of lifelike experiences makes 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible' - the Google purpose - seem almost pedestrian.

Facebook is in the process of changing society and doing so by making communication some kind of sixth sense or fifth element. It's easy to trivialize likes and shares but underneath lies truly profound change.

The magical word is not social, not network but reality. Reality in this context is the humanizing of experiences that are currently desensitized by lack of physical presence and real time interaction and ultimately the sensory separation that necessarily, until now, has created emotional as physical distance.

F8 was long on announcements that confirm the energy, trajectory and scale of Facebook's ambition. Two stood out and occupy the poles of practical and magical. The announcement of business integrations with Messenger, bring real identity, natural language dialog and real time to customer interactions with companies. The second, the update on Oculus, in which clear statements were made of 2015 mass market shipping of Crescent Bay, the latest iteration of its consumer VR device. The proximity of large scale shipping and the obvious advances of the product, the demonstration is head spinning, would give anyone confidence that virtual reality is at a tipping point and that the emphasis is moving from virtual to reality.

2500 developers, themselves the creators of Facebook's pervasive app ecosystem, left F8 with the sense that Zuckerberg's ambition will comfortably accommodate their own and provide the audience and technology backbone to support their own investments.

For advertisers F8 showed that live and lifelike experiences and real time customer interaction are near term necessities rather than a hypothetical way station on the 2925 road map.

@robnorman