Facebook F8: Big day for music and movies?
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Facebook’s F8 developer conference takes place today, kicking-off with a keynote speech from Mark Zuckerberg later this morning, and we’ll be there covering the big event.
For weeks rumors have run a bit wild as to what Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, will have to say at this year’s conference, which is widely anticipated as the social networking giant’s most important so far.
Facebook is expected to announce a set of products and tools aimed at getting users to consume and share more media in the social network.
Photos: The many faces of Facebook
The expectation is that this will at least mean that Facebook will launch some sort of music service, probably with partners already in the online music space such as Pandora, Spotify or MOG.
Facebook could even do the same type of partnerships with content distributors for movies and TV shows, and even books. And, of course, being Facebook, the rumor is that you would share what you’re doing/listening to/watching/reading with your Facebook friends.
Recently, Facebook has made a number of changes to its News Feed, installing a real-time ‘ticker’ that displays what a user’s friends are doing as they do it.
The world’s largest social network, with some 750 million users, also added the ability to subscribe to other users’ wall posts without having to ‘friend’ them and it improved the ease with which users can group friends into lists -- two moves made somewhat in response to its rivals Google+ and Twitter.
The changes, particularly in the way the news feed works and the introduction of the ticker, have left some Facebook users ... well ... ticked off. But the changes could seem less irritating to if Facebook makes the announcements it is widely expected to make.
How will F8 play out? Will Facebook become a competitor to YouTube, iTunes and maybe even Netflix or Amazon? Or will it team with any of those major players to get users to spend more of their time online within its site? Could we finally see a Facebook iPad app?
We’ll be at F8 blogging each announcement, so stay tuned.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles