How to watch Facebook's F8 developers conference live on the web
Fans of social networking site Facebook can stay up to date with the latest information streamed straight from the company's f8 Developers conference. — During the April 21 conference Facebook developers and entrepreneurs …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Independent's watch-guide framing undersells the day: PC World ('Expectations Run High') and GigaOM ('How Facebook Plans to Take Over the Web') both treated the April 21, 2010 f8 conference as a platform event, not a routine dev gathering. Unconfirmed reports dating to April 16 held that Facebook was preparing its own location feature, possibly for unveiling on stage.
The stakes are concrete for the ecosystem Facebook has already built: brands have rushed to amass fan bases in the millions, an analysis pegged the monetary value of a fan at $3.60 based on news-feed impressions, and developers have been waiting on an official iPad app the company has not shipped.
First-order effects
- Developers and entrepreneurs watching the live stream learn immediately whether the rumored location feature is real — the claim remained unconfirmed as of the conference.
- Brands with million-connection fan bases face whatever changes Facebook makes to the platform APIs and news-feed mechanics their reach depends on.
Second-order effects
- If a Facebook location product does ship, standalone check-in and location startups competing for the same behavior are forced to differentiate against the social graph overnight.
- Any shift in how feed impressions are distributed directly reprices the analyst-modeled $3.60-per-fan figure that brands have been using to justify building audiences on the platform.
Third-order effects
- If f8 keeps functioning as the annual stage for extending Facebook beyond the profile page, developers and brands become structurally dependent on a platform whose rules are reset once a year on someone else's schedule.
- A confirmed move into location would mark Facebook expanding from a destination site into a layer across the web — the 'take over the web' framing GigaOM gave the event made explicit.
The trend: Annual developer keynotes are becoming the mechanism by which Facebook extends its social graph into adjacent behaviors like location, resetting third-party business models each cycle.