Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) makes its employees take a day off
every month or two to brainstorm on new ideas for the site. And after these Hackathons,
the ideas are voted on by the engineering team. The top ones are presented to
the CEO and his executive team.
According to the founder, Facebook Connect, Chat, Video,
Facebook Live and some internal tools are the outcomes of such Hackathons. This
time, Zuckerberg decided to go live with the hackathon prototype forum.
In the live stream discussion, Zuckerberg was joined by Jay Parikh (Head of Engineering), Deborah Liu (Head of Platform, Marketplace and Payments), Mike Schroepfer (Chief Technology Officer) and Chris Cox (Chief Product Officer).
OCULUS TOUCH CONTROLLERS:
The first prototype presented was an Oculus Touch Controller by
the Oculus VR Team that simulated warmth or cold using embedded thermal
coolers. A demo was shown where the controller physically turned hot or cold
based on the game being played. The controller was ‘quite warm’ when hovering
over a fire.
LOCATION
REQUESTS IN MESSENGER:
‘Location requests’ will allow selected people to request for
your location on messenger.
In case you go missing, your friend can send a location request
to you. A custom timer is set. During this time, you can either accept or
decline the request. The timer expires after a while. Once the timer goes
off, your location is sent automatically.
Even if you are not accessing Messenger app at that time or the phone
is in your pocket, this feature will work. Zuckerberg commented that this just
added on to Safety Check of Facebook, that allows people to mark themselves
safe during disasters.
GIFs
IN FACEBOOK COMMENT:
The next feature was including GIFs in comments. You can search,
upload or link GIFs in comments too.
The GIFs are searched from the same feeders that Messenger
app uses. ‘This could be widely used’, Zuckerberg commented.
OFFLINE
MESSAGING:
If somewhere you lose connection to the Internet or lose network,
you can probably use Wi-Fi direct to chat with your friend in the vicinity.
However, only Messenger Lite had the demo for the peer-to-peer
communication due to time constraint.
Recently, offline messaging through third party phones is also
being considered. ‘That’s really cool’ was the response from most of the teams,
including Zuckerberg.
SHARED
PHOTO AND VIDEO GALLERIES IN RECOMMENDATIONS:
Launched in October, Recommendations provides you with
references to places, restaurants and businesses. Using machine learning, it
selects these suggestions from your friends and provides them to you based on
your preferences.
The new feature will let you add a shared album or video gallery
to your friend. All the photos or videos that people might upload in comments
regarding a post, will be shared as a photo album or video gallery on the
person’s news feed.
For example, if I post a status asking for my friend’s birthday
pictures or videos, people can share the photos and videos on my post. However,
that won’t be necessary because Recommendations will share these photos and
videos directly on my feed.
SOME
QUESTIONS ANSWERED:
To round off, Zuckerberg talked about his Jarvis AI being his
own personal Hackathon project. He also mentioned that he would give a
demo of his AI butler before the year ends.
On asked if the public might be able to contribute to the
hackathon, Zuckerberg spoke about maintaining the confidentiality of the
company in such situations. However, Jay spoke about some hackathons that are
sponsored for the community in campuses and other parts of the world.
Facebook has never failed to release new updates and features
every year. It remains to be seen if some of these ‘hacks’ will become a part
of future features of the social platform.
Dominating
Features of Facebook:
Leaving behind its financial
troubles of the past few years, Facebook has emerged to be a rival to Google this year.
Facebook is establishing itself in every field out there. Some of the
new features released this year are:
·
Dynamic Facebook Pages:
Facebook pages are no more unresponsive, static pages. Users can now call
businesses, book services, buy products, book tickets and do more through Facebook pages. This brings a whole
new market for major brands, businesses and sellers to reach out to customers
directly through Facebook.
·
Messenger Platform:
It is the most optimal place for marketers as it has 1 billion monthly active users on its site. ‘Messenger Platform‘ has
reformed the mobile shopping experience. Users can interact with Messenger Chat bots. The marketing messages
are personalised for each consumer. It allows them to buy products and
make payments without leaving the app.
·
Facebook Live:
Way back in April, Facebook announced Facebook Live, allowing
people and pages to post live videos on the site. Brands have utilised this
simple but effective marketing concept of Facebook to multiply their sales.
While many businesses haven’t caught on to the concept
effectively, there have been many success
stories of Facebook Live in the
past few months.
·
Facebook Marketplace
In October, Facebook introduced Marketplace, with the aim of
dominating the e-Commerce industry. A marketplace is an enhanced buying
and selling platform. It allows people to buy and sell products within a
community. This is a major step for Facebook, as it has the highest number of
users as compared to other players in the same
field.
·
Workplace
With Workplace,
Facebook hopes to jump into enterprise software, alongside rivals like Google
and Microsoft. The workplace is basically a corporate
messaging tool, that could replace emails everywhere. Soon enough, Facebook
will also have companies posting job listings on the network.
·
Recommendations
Recommendations, as already mentioned, could revolutionise the user experience on Facebook. The new shared photo and
video gallery feature hack could bring more attraction to the users.
Facebook
Taking Over All Platforms:
The biggest question is why is Facebook so inclined on releasing
new features and updates.
Facebook is touted as one of the biggest tech giants. Given the
acquisitions, features and updates, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have a full-fledged
plan of dominating the world across all industries. Courtesy the huge user
base, Facebook is surely on the winning side!
In 2012, Facebook acquired
Instagram and turned it into its
own photo app. Today, companies and users can have a unified front on Facebook, Messenger and
Instagram. Next, in 2014, Facebook bought out Oculus against many criticisms.
However, with Oculus, Facebook has changed the face of VR in the recent times.
Oculus now has a net worth of $700
million. And then comes the most popular purchase- Facebook bought out
Whatsapp. It has only made way for the company to dominate the mobile
messaging apps sector. Facebook also purchased TheFind, an e-Commerce
platform, and jumped into the e-Commerce industry too. Still, the social
media giant is not at peace. Why so!
Facebook still faces a stiff competition from Snapchat and has already
incorporated most of the app’s features for Messenger and Instagram. It is also
going hand in hand, in terms of revenue, with retail giant Amazon. And if
you are thinking about the war between Google
and Facebook? That will continue for a long time!
Dazeinfo had also reported that currently, LinkedIn and Twitter
have a better marketing platform than Facebook.
Hence, Facebook still has a lot more to prove and many more
hurdles to cross before it can claim its right as the biggest tech giant ever.
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