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| Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the company's fourth F8 conference in 2011. On Tuesday, the social network announced a new program called 'Developer |
When Facebook launched its developer
platform at the company’s annual F8 conference 10 years ago, the social
network’s roughly 200 employees couldn’t keep up with the demand from its 20
million users -- and businesses -- for a growing host of tools and services.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had
just started speaking about the concept of the social graph. To leverage this
asset, Facebook thought it most likely needed to work with partners and
developers to build quickly and creatively enough.
“We were fairly nervous going on
stage launching the Facebook platform,” Facebook’s VP of platform partnerships
Ime Archibong said in a briefing ahead of this year’s F8. “It was a massive
investment that the company had made for developers, but we had no idea how
developers would actually take to the platform.”
Activity on the platform has taken
off. More than 30 million apps and websites use Facebook’s developer tools, and
Facebook drives billions of app installations per year. More than 85% of the
top 100 grossing apps in the U.S. use Facebook Login, which facilitates
sign-ins and can help apps gather more data on their users. And more than 1
million apps, websites and bots have used Facebook Analytics since its launch
in 2015.
Facebook’s developer ecosystem has
also become increasingly global. More than 80% of developers using the platform
are based outside of the U.S., and now internet connectivity and affordability
affect how Facebook builds tools. Facebook has also paid out nearly $10 billion
to app developers over the past 10 years.
“It’s a signal that people value
what we’re doing and what we’re building,” Archibong said. “The recognition
that Mark [Zuckerberg] and the rest of the team had and has always had since is
that any of the opportunities that we are going after as a company that are
going to be of consequence, we have to do with a community of people -- with
partners, with developers.”
“Everyone who can build on us is
amplifying the impact we thought we could have,” he added.
Going Beyond Startups
In 2014, Facebook launched its
FbStart program, which has helped several thousand early stage apps build and
grow their apps through a set of free tools and mentorship meetings. On
Tuesday, Facebook unveiled a new program to reach a broader range of
developers, as well as students interested in technology.
The program, called “Developer
Circles,” is intended to bring developers in local communities together offline
as well as online in Facebook groups to encourage the sharing of technical
know-how, discuss ideas and build new projects. The program is also designed to
serve students who may not yet be working on an app, but who are interested in
building skills to work in computer science.
Each “Circle,” which are currently
organized by cities, has a community lead who helps organize offline events and
help make custom Facebook training programs available to members through a
partnership with online education platform Udacity. The training programs,
which could address topics like Facebook open source technology, React
(Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces) and building bots
for Messenger, will be available via Developer Circles Facebook Groups, as well
as on Facebook’s and
Udacity’s sites.
Archibong said “Circles” have
been active for the past year in a pilot program. The Lagos, Nigeria “Circle”
chapter now has 1,500 members, he said. The group lead, named Innocent, can use
tailored learning plans called “social learning units,” to help his group,
including students, get up to speed on specific technical interests over months
or weeks.
“Now anyone can find a home or
community, even if they don’t have a startup,” Archibong said.
Login, Account Kit Updates
On Tuesday, Facebook also announced
a series of updates to Facebook Login and Account Kit aimed at making it easier
for users to log in to third-party apps using Facebook, email or a phone
number. Some of the updates will make it simpler for developers to help their
Facebook users log back in to Messenger due to forgotten passwords or lack of a
secondary communication channel.
Facebook is adding voice call phone
number verification in 19 areas, for example, for people who don’t receive
their confirmation code. Facebook is offering basic web support through Account
Kit to help developers build apps in areas with limited connectivity.
Developers will also have more ways to customize the Account Kit interface to
match their brand. And a new account recovery tool will allow an app’s
customers to use their Facebook account to verify their identify if they lose
their two-factor codes or don’t want to answer security questions.
Facebook also wants to help
developers better track users through Account Kit and Messenger. Developers can
now recognize Facebook-connected customers from their app through to their bots
on Messenger to help deliver more personalized, seamless experiences to users,
for example, walking users through watching a trailer to buying tickets and
getting into a theater using their phone. Down the line, Facebook plans to make
it possible for users to use Messenger to pay for their movie or items at a
retail store using the app to scan parametric bar codes to remove the need to
carry cash or a card.
After seeing entrepreneurs spend a
surprising amount of time analyze their app’s data, Facebook has expanded its
suite of analytics tools for developers and is making the interpretation of
that data more automated. The new tools give developers more analytics for
Facebook Pages and offline conversations, for example, allowing developers to
understand interactions people have with their Facebook Page along with other
activity on their website, app and bot.
The tool can help a business, for
example, track if a user who liked an item in a Facebook Page post ended up
purchasing that item in the developer’s app, which could help developers better
understand how to drive users to make a purchase.
Artificial intelligence and machine
learning are helping Facebook deliver personalized, automated data analysis to
developers through the “Automated Insights” tool. The feature can alert
developers to patterns such as changes in purchase volumes after the release of
a new app version, or to trends in engagement across users in different cities.
Custom dashboards now also let developers pin important reports and track
analytics more easily.
Archibong noted than an app in Nigeria, for example, can
use these analytics tools to help religious centers understand the relationship
between a member’s digital engagement with their app an in-person donations.
“We hope apps will be able to make
better daily decisions based on the data,” Archibong said.
Following Users
Facebook is also giving developers more
nuanced way to target users through a tool called “custom audiences.”
Developers can now reach users based on their behavior across their app and
website, for example, targeting people who viewed an item on both an e-commerce
store and a native shopping app. Developers will also now have access to a new
“Places Graph” with free data on more than 140 million places on the world,
ranging from restaurants to parks, local businesses and retail stores. Apps can
use this data to offer location-specific features that help users find nearby
services. Interactions with places on Facebook have been strong. In January, 1
billion of Facebook's nearly 2 billion users engaged with places on the social
network.
Archibong noted that tools like
Facebook Login and the massive, encouraging community that apps can foster
among users has helped apps like the Nike
NKE -0.45%+ running app rack up tens of millions of downloads.
“They’ve been able to build stronger
religious communities, they’ve been able to make the world safer and build
stronger civic communities, and that’s what we’re incredibly proud of,”
Archibong said of developers using Facebook. “There’s no way one company can do
this alone.”
Source: Kathleen Chaykowski, Forbes.com
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