F8 is one of the most important conferences of the year for the social media world.
And over the past couple of days, Facebook has announced a ton of huge updates for its suite of products including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, Oculus, and more.
With so much going on, and so many updates and launches, it can be hard to keep up with. So with F8 2018 in the history books, we thought it’d be useful to recap some of the most important announcements Facebook made during its flagship conference.
Here are five key updates from F8 2018 and some thoughts on what F8 could mean for the social media industry moving forward:
F8 2018: 5 key updates
1. Sharing to Stories
Stories are now an incredibly popular content format, so popular in fact that we may see Stories begin to rival the news feed as the default content consumption and creation method in the not-to-distant future.
As TechCrunch reported, “Nearly a billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger now create and watch these vertical, ephemeral slideshows.”
Instagram Stories alone has more than 300 million daily users. And as people are already using Stories share their interests, Facebook announced that it’s making that experience “faster, easier and more creative.”
Users will now be able to share content from third-party apps directly to their Stories. Instagram explained more on their blog:
From a sticker of your new favorite song on Spotify to action shots from GoPro, it’s now easy to share what you’re up to or how you’re feeling by posting directly to Instagram Stories from other apps. More apps will be adding the sharing to Stories feature soon.
Here’s how sharing to Stories from Spotify will look:
2. Groups tab coming to the Facebook app
During his keynote on day one of F8, Mark Zuckerburg shared that 1.4 billion people are now using Facebook Groups every month.
As such, Facebook is looking to make Groups a more prominent feature for app users by introducing a Groups tab, which will help users navigate to your existing Groups more easily and interact with content from all your Groups.
Discovery also seems to be important for Facebook with Zuckerburg sharing that “later this year, you’ll be able to discover and join new groups through the tab.”
3. Video chat on Instagram
More than 100 million Instagrammers watch or share on Live every day. And Facebook announced that video chat will be available in Instagram Direct in a few weeks offering both one-to-one and group conversations.
This update will enable Instagram users to experience real-time video in a smaller group, without having to broadcast publicly.
Video and group chat seemed to be a big focus during F8, with an announcement that Whatsapp will also be adding group calling in the months ahead. These updates follow on hotly on the heels of Facebook’s group chat app, Bonfire, opening up for testing in late 2017.
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