Facebook has officially announced the date and place where the company’s next F8 conference will take place, and surprisingly enough it appears that the 2017 F8 event will be held around the same time as it was this year, April 18-19. This is somewhat surprising given the fact that Facebook F8 conferences never really had a fixed schedule, but it appears that the company has already decided on these details many months in advance.
This year’s F8 conference was held at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco on April 12-13 where Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to discuss “the future of connection” and video-related AI among other things including a 360-degree camera. The 2017 F8 event will take place around the same time next year, on April 18-19, but apparently the company has decided to change location and thus, the event will take place in the larger McEnery Convention Center in San Jose. Although not many details have been revealed in regards to what we can expect from the conference, Facebook teases “more than 45 sessions” so theoretically there should be plenty of interesting announcements for regular Facebook users and otherwise.
Facebook’s F8 yearly conferences haven’t necessarily been held on a yearly basis, so this could be the reason why the company wanted to announce these details roughly 6 months ahead of time. As a quick reminder, the first F8 conference was held on May 24, 2007, followed by the 2008 F8 event on July 23 of the said year. In 2010 the company announced a number of new Facebook features including Social Plugins, Open Graph Protocol, and Graph API, and in 2011 the F8 conference was mainly focused on the development of new products and touched on subjects such as “the future of digital music” and “the rise of social gaming”. No F8 events were held in years 2009, 2012, and 2013, but since 2014 the company seems to have settled on a yearly schedule. As to what we can expect from F8 2017, it’s too early for speculations but judging by the current technology trends, it wouldn’t be too surprising if Facebook were to discuss the future of deep learning and artificial intelligence among other concepts.