Facebook to revive f8 after three-year hiatus
Facebook announced Saturday that it's bringing back its once-annual f8 developer conference. After taking a three-year break, the company will hold its next f8 event on April 30 at the San Francisco Design Concourse.
The one-day conference will be even more developer-focused than in years past, meaning it will be highly technical in nature and not likely to include any bombshell consumer-product reveals. Attendees can expect the company to pay extra attention to mobile-app development, an area of supreme significance for the company, especially following last year's acquisition of Parse.
The tone will be radically different from Facebook's previous f8 event, held in September 2011, where company CEO Mark Zuckerberg made splashy consumer announcements including its radical profile redo called Timeline and the now mostly defunct Ticker.
This time around, Facebook will kick of f8 with a keynote address from an unknown executive -- Zuckerberg is not a definite -- who could make announcements related to Parse, mobile-app ads, or even Facebook's fledgling mobile ad network. The social network said in January that it had started a small test with partner advertisers to show Facebook ads in their mobile apps. At the time, Facebook promised additional details in the months ahead.
"This year, we're going back to our roots and having a pure developer conference," Parse CEO Ilya Sukar said in a statement shared with CNET. "F8 will open with a morning keynote, followed by four tracks that will cover getting-started guides, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies, engineering deep dives, and advertising tips for making your app or game highly successful."
F8 will have room for 1,500 developers, who will have to apply for a spot to attend the conference, a company spokesperson told CNET. Facebook will announce registration details in the weeks ahead.
This article originally appeared on CNET.
