Deborah Liu's keynote on Facebook platform tools at F8 2016: transcript

Key points

• Facebook platform launched in 2007 with 24 million users; it now has nearly 1.6 billion users.
• Documentation for major products is rolling out in 16 languages, and the goal of fixing 90% of bugs within 30 days was exceeded.
• Account Kit lets people sign in with a phone number or email, without a password or a Facebook account, using an SMS code.
• Savn, a music app in India, saw half a million new phone registrations and a 33% rise in daily registrations in testing.
• A Save button for sites outside Facebook, people insights in analytics and customizable push and in-app notifications were announced.

Chapters

1. 0:07Platform growth and developer ecosystem
2. 1:43Documentation in 16 languages and platform stability
3. 2:46Sign-up problems and Facebook Login
4. 3:57Introducing Account Kit
5. 5:35Sharing quotes and the Save button for sites
6. 7:44Analytics improvements and notifications

Full transcript

0:07Hey, it is great to be back here at F8. And it's really hard to believe that it's been nearly a decade since Facebook platform launched. In fact, the day that Facebook platform launched in 2007, there were 24 million people using Facebook. And I checked, the iPhone was still a month away from being launched. Today, there are nearly 1.6 billion people using Facebook, and nearly 2 billion smartphones being used by people every day.

0:40The world has changed so much, and our platform has continued to evolve with it. Thanks to your feedback, and your partnership, and your meetings with us, and telling us what you're looking for, we've continued to develop products to help you build, grow, and monetize your apps. To date, we've paid out nearly $9.5 billion, including substantial growth from audience network. And our developer ecosystem, all of you, is now bigger and more global than ever.

1:11We have developers from nearly 250 countries. And in fact, as Mark mentioned, in just the past year, the number of developers leveraging Facebook platform to build their apps has grown over 40%. percent. In all these countries pictured, more than 80% of the top apps use Facebook platform in order to build their apps. But we've heard from all of you that you spend a lot of time doing things like translating our documentation so that you can code.

1:43And so today, we're excited to share that we're rolling out documentation for all of our major products in 16 languages. And we'll continue to roll this out and expand this throughout the next year. The other thing we've heard from you is that stability, having a stable platform, is critical. so last year we stood up on the stage and promised that we would fix 90% of bugs within 30 days and I'm proud to share that we've seeded that goal but you didn't come here just to hear about the past I know what you really came to here which is what's to come as many of you know to build successful app you need to do three things really well one is get people signed up two is to get people engaged and keep them engaged and three is to understand what keeps them coming back so let's talk about sign up sign up is the front gate to your app

2:46and it's often the hardest for people to get through So, how many times have you guys encountered this? How many times have you had a password you can't remember with an extra character here and a special character there? And how many times have you wanted a username, but it's been taken, and so you have to take another one, which you can't recall the next time you come back in? And how many times have you been caught by CAPTCHA? That's why eight years ago, we introduced Facebook Login to help people quickly create and set up accounts with your apps.

3:22And today, Facebook login is the number one single sign-on product in the world, with hundreds of millions of people logging into your apps every single month. And we continue to innovate on this product. In fact, in just the last year, we have grown overall conversion rates 10%. And we've seen some apps actually reach conversion rates of over 90% with a great implementation. But we know not everyone has a Facebook account. And some people with a Facebook account may want to have more options, such as signing in with their email address or phone number.

3:57But consistently, we hear this, people hate usernames and passwords. And that's why today, we're introducing Account Kit. Account Kit lets people easily and quickly sign into apps with just their email address or phone number. So you don't have to have a password, you don't have to have a username, you don't have to even share any information from your Facebook account. In fact, anyone can use Account Kit even without a Facebook account.

4:31And beneath all of this is Facebook's world-class infrastructure and technology. Let's take a look at how it works. You click here on the phone number option, you enter your phone number, and you get an SMS code that you enter there, and you're done. That's it. It's that simple. It's just a few lines of code to implement in your app, and it's completely global, with SMS support in 230 country codes and in more than 40 languages.

5:04We've been testing account kits for some time with over 20 partners in 11 countries, and And we've seen great results. Savin, India's largest music app, has been testing it side by side with Facebook Login and Account Kit. And they allow people to sign in with their phone number. In the first two months alone, they saw half a million new phone number registrations. And more amazingly, they saw a 33% increase in daily registrations.

5:35Imagine your app growing 33% faster every day. Beyond sign up, you have to grow your app, and you need to grow engagement. Tens of thousands of apps share content to Facebook every day. how many times have you been reading a book or an article and you want to share it but there's actually a quote you want to pull out and share with it before people took screenshots or maybe you had to cut and paste text which is difficult on mobile but we can make that a lot easier so let's say you're reading a book the originals and you take some texts that you want to share in this quote you click here you add your own commentary and it's done it's that simple a couple years ago we launched save on Facebook which allows you to save content for later and today every single month 250 million people use this

6:35product and many of you asked us if we could extend this functionality to your apps and websites as well and so today we're releasing the save button for sites off of Facebook. It lets you save interesting articles, products, and videos in one place, so you can easily access it from any device later. I've been testing with 30 developers in 12 different countries, and let's take a look at how it works. So my husband and I have been planning to take our kids to Asia this summer, and I came across an article about kid-friendly restaurants in Manila.

7:10Well, obviously, at this moment, I'm not planning my itinerary, and so I set it aside. I click Save to Facebook, and I can come back to it later when we're talking about the things that we want to do. Now I can access it when I go to my Facebook account, and there it is right there. All the items that I save are in one place on Facebook, so I can find it again. And I can get reminders if products go on sale or there's an article that I should revisit later. Understanding your audience is really important.

7:44And last year at F8, we introduced Facebook Analytics for apps to help you understand how people are using your apps so that you can engage them better. And to date, over 450,000 apps have used this product. And today, we're announcing two new improvements to this product. One is people insights on our analytics dashboard. This will show you aggregated, anonymized demographic data for things like page likes and interests for people who use your app, so you can understand how to keep them engaged. We're also introducing customizable push and in-app notifications. In-app notifications allows you to use animated GIFs, photos, and sounds to engage your audience in your app.

8:34That's just a glimpse of some of the products that we're launching for developers this year. Many of you helped shape these products or gave us these ideas with your talks and your time with us. And we thank you. And now I'd like to bring up Imei, head of partnerships, who talk about how we can work together to build better products.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Deborah Liu's Keynote @ Facebook F8 16'.webm by SiliconANGLE theCUBE (2016-04-12), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.