What Does Facebook Have in Store for F8?

Third-party developer access to Facebook Messenger, more robust measurement tools for mobile developers and a mobile ad exchange to take on Twitter’s MoPub top the list of speculated announcements at Facebook’s F8 global developers conference in San Francisco next week.

F8 will be held March 25 and 26 at Fort Mason Center.

In the past, announcements at F8 have included:

• The revamped Facebook Login and anonymous login
• Mobile ad network Facebook Audience Network
• Deep-linking solution App Links
• A set of application-programming interfaces for media organizations
• The FbStart initiative to provide support for developers
• Extending the like button to applications
• Mobile install notifications
• Graph API 2.0
• Timeline
• Ticker
• News Feed apps
• Open Graph
• Social plugins

What’s in store next week? Josh Constine of TechCrunch reported that Facebook will reveal a way for third-party developers to add \"experiences\" to its Messenger apps, speculating that the move was spurred by the success of Asian chat apps WeChat and Line.

Sources told Constine Messenger will be a major focus at F8, and he speculated that this initiative would be limited to Facebook preferred partners at launch.

Also, The Information reported earlier this week that Facebook will release a tool at F8 that will enable mobile app developers to determine if ads spurred users to download their apps.

According to The Information, the tool will compare the performance of ads on Facebook versus those on other platforms.

Molly McCarty, senior social account manager at digital marketing agency 3Q Digital, which was recently acquired by Harte Hanks, discussed the potential new measurement tool in an email to SocialTimes:

Building a tool that allows advertisers to track installs off of Facebook is a natural next step after the launch of its Audience Network and, more recently, its acquisition of Atlas. Many of the accounts I work on perform well because of the targeting that is possible through Facebook. If we could start applying those targeting methods to campaigns running off of Facebook, and still measure installs, this would be a game changer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like targeting has been mentioned yet, so it’s very possible that targeting users off of Facebook will be more limited than running the ads on Facebook itself.

Finally, Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Facebook is developing a mobile ad exchange to take on MoPub, adding that the infrastructure that is already in place for such a launch, including Facebook Audience Network, which allows advertisers to apply the social network’s targeting capabilities to ads on third-party mobile apps, as well as the measurement capabilities of its Atlas ad platform.

Readers: What do you expect Facebook to announce at F8 next week?