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The much-awaited Facebook’s F8 annual conference for developers kicked off on April 12 with a lot of surprises. From livestreaming platforms and 3D cameras to new virtual reality technology that will give users the ability to interact through body languages and voice - the platform showcased a lot of goodies, making both the average Facebook user and the developers happy.

Connection was the buzzword at the conference, with most of the announcements aimed at making users connect with each other faster and easier. The conference also had Mark Zuckerberg unveiling a 10-year technology roadmap for the social networking site.

These projects are still works in progress and it is unclear as to when and how they will be rolled out to users.

Here are some of the important announcements:

*Facebook Live is a livestreaming platform that can be now used to stream videos for any number of sources and not just mobile phones. The stream can be from any video source.

*Chatbots for Messenger: Businesses will now be able to deliver customer support on Facebook Messenger through chatbots, i.e. these bots will also be allowed to send images and links to users.

The bot can be utilised by the businesses to send e-commerce transaction or receive customer support updates. It can also provide automated subscription content like weather, and traffic updates.

* The social media site also revealed a new 3D-360 degree camera called the Surround 360. The camera includes ‘stitching technology’ which will connect the video footage from 17 cameras. The design specs and stitching code will be available soon on GitHub.

* Profile Expression Kit: This feature will allow Facebook users to share videos from third-party apps directly as Facebook Profile Video instead of the profile photo. The closed beta kicked off with support for six apps: Boomerang by Instagram, Lollicam, BeautyPlus, Cinemagraph Pro by Flixel, Lollicam, MSQRD, and Vine.

* Account Kit: This is an authentication system for developers with the help of which they can create login pages that allows them to sign in with their email ID, phone number or Facebook ID. This does not require the user to create a password. The developers will just need to enter their phone number and can authenticate through a One Time Password sent to their phone.

So far, Saavn has tested the Account Kit with Facebook and the app received over 500,000 sign ups within two months.

* Save to Facebook: This feature is already available on Facebook, but the social media is planning to highlight it and make it easier to use. This will help the user to save interesting articles, products and videos to access it later from any device.

* Quote Sharing: For people who like to share quotes and other interesting tit-bits, Facebook is now planning to make it easier by giving an option of ‘Quote Sharing’. With this, user can share quotes they find across the web or apps with their Facebook friends.

* The Applied Machine Learning team at Facebook’s ongoing research efforts will allow even better ways for the people around the world to connect. Such as language translation, image understanding that will allow the image search according to its context rather than tags.

*Social VR: Facebook is now experimenting the ways people can connect and share using the new VR technology. Some of the projects they are working involve combining a sense of presence with the ability to interact through body languages and voice.

(Photos: AP and Reuters)