After a three-year hiatus, Facebook is bringing back its F8 developer conference.
Come April 30, Facebook will return to its "roots" and is set to host the conference at the San Francisco Design Concourse. For the uninitiated, F8 is the social networking giant's conference for software developers in an attempt to get them to devise better mobile apps for the company.
Ilya Sukkar, co-founder and CEO of Facebook-owned Parse, made the announcement of F8's return on Saturday, March 8 at the SXSw.
"This year, we're going back to our roots and having a pure developer conference," wrote Sukhar in a blog post. "F8 will open with a morning keynote, followed by four tracks that will cover getting started guides, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies, engineering deep dives, and advertising tips for making your app or game highly successful. We'll also have sessions dedicated to exploring how developers can take advantage of open source technologies."
The last F8 took place in 2011 and the focus of the conference was primarily finding novel ways to share content. This was established with the launch of revamped user profiles. The Timeline too made its debut at the time. The year before, in 2010, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the "Like" button.
By returning to its roots, the F8 will focus on hands-on workshops and tech sessions for developers. It will provide nearly 1500 developers the opportunity to create, grow and generate revenue from apps.
"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. My favorite app of the moment is Threes. I can't stop playing it. But building a hit app and finding people who will love it is really hard. Turning that app into a money making venture is even harder. Helping developers solve these problem is why we're doing an F8," said Sukhar in a Facebook post.
Facebook will begin accepting applications soon and registration will open in the coming weeks. "More than 1,500 mobile and web developers from all over the world" are expected to attend.
Those wishing to attend the F8 need to sign-up here and will be notified when the tickets become available.
