Facebook F8


Facebook F8 is a mostly-annual conference held by Facebook, intended for developers and entrepreneurs who build products and services around the website. It was hosted in San Francisco, California until 2016, and moved to a more central Silicon Valley location in San Jose, California in 2017. Previous events have started with a keynote speech by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, followed by various breakout sessions concentrating on specific topics. Facebook has often introduced new features, and made new announcements, at the conference.
The "F8" name comes from Facebook's tradition of 8 hour hackathons.
The scheduling of F8 has been somewhat erratic. The 2008 conference was held in late July and the 2011 conference was held in late September. There were no other conferences held in 2009, 2012 and 2013. The 2020 F8 conference, originally scheduled for May 5 and 6, was not an in-person event. The event was rescheduled for April 25 as an online conference and it was live streamed. This change was due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2007

The first F8 event was held on May 24, 2007, at the San Francisco Design Center in San Francisco. The notion of the social graph was introduced.

2008

The 2008 F8 event was held July 23, 2008, at the San Francisco Design Center once again. News and announcements from this event included:
The 2010 F8 event was held April 21, 2010 at the San Francisco Design Center. The main announcement was the feature to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on a website by the owner. This feature is now integrated within around 2.5 million websites worldwide, with 10,000 more being added daily.
Additional news and announcements included:
F8 2011 was held on September 22, 2011. Various things Facebook introduced at the conference included a new profile redesign named 'Timeline' that showed a history of user's activity on their profile, and a broader, more advanced version of the 'Open Graph' protocol.
The F8 2011 event was mainly focused on introducing new products, transforming industries, building and growing social applications and product Q&A. Some of the details of the topics were:
F8 2014 was announced on March 8, 2014 by Facebook representative Ilya Sukhar that the F8 event would return on April 30.
The conference was focused on Facebook's strategy to become a 'cross-platform platform'.
Here is a list of the main topics:
The 2015 F8 conference was held on March 25, 2015 at the Fort Mason Center.

2016

The 2016 F8 conference was held on April 12 and 13, 2016.
Announcements: Facebook Analytics adds push and in app notifications feature

2017

The 2017 F8 conference was held on April 18 and 19, 2017, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. Announcements included:
The 2018 F8 conference was held on the first two days of May 2018 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. At the conference, Facebook announced the creation of their own online dating service. Shares in the dating business Match Group fell by 22% after the announcement.

2019

The 2019 F8 conference was held at the end of April 2019 and the beginning of May 2019 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. During the keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced: "The future is private."

2020

The 2020 F8 conference was held on April 25, 2020 as a virtual event.