Facebook to Hold Its First Developer Conference Since 2011 The conference, to be held in San Francisco on April 30, will focus on the development of mobile apps.
By Laura Entis
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
From 2007 to 2011, Facebook held an annual global developer conference, dubbed f8, every year in San Francisco. Then the conferences abruptly stopped.
On Saturday, at SXSW, the company announced that it will revive f8 this year, after a nearly three year hiatus. The conference will take place on April 30 in the San Francisco Design Center's Concourse Exhibition Center. Around 1,500 developers are expected to attend. (Those wishing to go can sign up here to be notified when tickets become available).
While the 2011 conference focused on desktop applications, this year's will center on mobile. "App development is happening at such a crazy pace these days. Almost every day I find a new app that is solving problems or providing entertainment in a really creative way," Ilya Sukhar, CEO of Parse, the mobile app platform developer Facebook acquired in April, wrote in a blog post announcing the news.
Related: Facebook to App Developers: Don't Make Social an Afterthought
"But building a hit app and finding people who will love it is really hard," he continued. "Turning that app into a money making venture is even harder. Helping developers solve these problem is why we're doing F8."
F8 will open with a morning keynote, followed by four smaller sessions that will include guides to getting started, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies and advertising tips.
At past conferences, Mark Zuckerberg has announced breaking company news at the f8 keynote. In 2011, he revealed the Timeline and Open Graph platform. And the year before, he unveiled the "Like" button.
Not only will attendees get feedback and advice from Facebook, Parse and Instagram engineers, they'll also get to sample Facebook's famous food. Lunch, the conference's website reads, will be "prepared by Facebook's culinary team." And the day's activities will be followed by, in the words of Sukhar," a sweet party to close it out."
Related: In Mobile Push, Facebook Buys Parse to Court App Developers
