No question about it…April was a helluva ride for Facebook and the Facebook user community.
With U.S. congressional hearings behind him, an upbeat Mark Zuckerberg was back to work as normal. He addressed the company’s F8 developer conference on Tuesday in San Jose, California. Watching live online, The Travel Vertical picked up these highlights, in which the keyword was “building.”
- More aggressively tackling privacy and hate-speech issues while continuing to build.
- Building a “Clear History” option for users to scrub their accounts of data sent to Facebook via outside apps and websites.
- Building a new dating site for your non-friends, one that friends cannot see without your OK. Note: shares of Match Group Inc., owner of Match.com, OKCupid, and Tinder shares fell 21% immediately.
- Relief for app makers as Facebook returns to app review and approval, which had been stalled due to the urgency of privacy-related work.
- New Instagram features for video chat and to allow posting information from outside apps directly to Instagram Stories where they remain for 24 hours.
- Oculus Go, a cordless virtual reality headset, immediately made available in 23 countries, supporting 1,000 apps, games, and movies to download on the headset, starting out with 21 loaded. The U.S. price is $199 for 32GB and $249 for 64GB.
- Messenger to get into multi-lingual conversation capabilities, starting with English-Spanish.
- Introducing VR Memories and 3D Photos.
