Virtual Reality Camera And 6 Things You Should Know From This Year's Facebook Conference

The future is bright for the social media giant

On 12 and 13 April, Facebook held its annual Developers Conference. This is the time where the social media giant unveiled some of its new features and services that all of its users are going to see in the coming months.

Facebook's annual global developer conference was held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on 12 and 13 April.

If you missed out on the event, no worries! Check out some of the highlights below:

1. Mark Zuckerberg attacks Donald Trump in his opening speech

Mark Zuckerberg gave an impassioned opening speech at Facebook's F8 developer conference keynote today, lambasting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters for fostering a culture of fear in the US.

He said, "As I look around and I travel around the world, I'm starting to see people and nations turning inward, against this idea of a connected world and a global community. I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others. For blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, reducing trade, and in some cases around the world even cutting access to the Internet."

2. Chat-bots wants to talk to you when you're lonely

Facebook is building artificial intelligence-powered "chat-bots" into its Messenger application to allow businesses to have software that can engage in lifelike text exchanges with users. These bots are software infused with the ability to "learn" from conversations, and could get better at figuring out what people are telling them and how best to respond.

3. The Messenger app was the fastest growing platform in 2015

Between Messenger and WhatsApp, people are sending 60 billion messages a day, Zuckerberg said. 900 million people use Facebook Messenger, but that's not enough. The company wants that number to be higher, and it hopes instant connection with services can be the way to do it.

4. VR (Virtual Reality) is going to be the next big thing

The Facebook Surround360 camera.

The lone hardware announcement was showing off a new Facebook Surround360 camera, a VR camera for creating 3D digital content. However, Facebook made clear that they’re not going into the camera business, so instead this hardware will all be open source. The camera will geared up with fish eye lenses and wide-angled lenses.

5. video profile pictures will be introduced to more apps like Instagram and Vine

Apps like Vine, Instagram's Boomerang, and Facebook's MSQRD will soon have buttons that let them send videos you capture directly over to Facebook, where they'll be put in place as your new profile image. Other apps will be able to support this too.

6. Any device is able to stream Facebook Live, including a drone

The company announced plans to increase its Live Video efforts even more. It's opening up a Live API so that anyone can build in the ability to stream live from any device. At the conference, Mark Zuckerberg showed that the ability to stream live video to Facebook has been built into a drone.

7. You can now share quotes directly to Facebook

Instead of copying and pasting a block of text, you’ll soon be able to highlight some text, then click a “Share Quote” button to send the highlighted text alongside a link to the article on your Facebook page. Right now, the Amazon Kindle is the only launch partner, but quote sharing will likely roll out to other sites in the future.

What was your biggest takeaway from this year's Developers Conference? Let me know in the comments below!