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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the F8 Facebook Developers conference on May 1, 2018 in San Jose, California.
- Facebook kicked off its big annual conference F8 on Tuesday, but there was something noticeably missing from its presentation: The News Feed.
- While Mark Zuckerberg and execs talked up talked up the possibilities of everything from Instagram stories to virtual reality, the News Feed - the core of the current Facebook experience - didn't get much love.
- The News Feed has caused constant headaches for the company around fake news and Russian disinformation campaigns, and Facebook is now diversifying its core business to focus less on the feature.
- Facebook is stepping back from providing tools to post in the public eye, and it points to a future in which the News Feed is less important than ever.
Facebook has a message for the world: We're back, baby.
On Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage for the keynote presentation at the company's annual F8 developer conference. Confident and cracking jokes , the 33-year-old executive seemed far more at ease than he ever did during his marathon Congressional testimony last month.
The social network is attempting to shift the conversation past the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the related privacy woes that have dominated headlines recently. To this end, it made a bevy of big new announcements at the first day of the conference - from a dating app that will rival Tinder, to wild new virtual reality features.
But there was one key Facebook product that was almost entirely absent from the speeches and announcements by Zuckerberg and other executives: The News Feed.
News Feed sits at the core of the traditional Facebook experience. It's what you see when you open the app, a literal feed of news from all your friends. But it's also a double-edged sword. Though wildly successful, it has created huge issues for the company - including the spread of fake news and the spread of Russian disinformation in the wake of the 2016 US election.
Smarting from successive crises, Facebook has already made significant changes to the News Feed, reducing the prominence of news outlets and introducing further context in the feed while cracking down on misinformation.
Early in his speech, Zuckerberg recapped these changes among the others it is making as it attempts to fix its laundry list of mistakes. But there was little in the way of new announcements around the News Feed.
Just look at what did get announced on Tuesday:
- Instagram is overhauling its entire Explore section, sticking augmented reality features in its camera, letting developers integrate with its Stories feature, and adding group video chats.
- Messenger is adding real-time language translation, AI-powered auto-replies to help small businesses, and semi-gimmicky augmented reality objects that brands can send in messages. Plus, it teased the major redesign it has in the works.
- WhatsApp is gaining group video calling, third-party stickers, and new tools for big businesses to access the platform and handle customer messages.
- Oculus, Facebook's virtual reality division, announced the launch of the $199 Oculus Go headset. It also teased some wild tech that lets you recreate virtual spaces using old videos.
Meanwhile, the main Facebook app got a few notable updates, chief among them a new dating service - news of which sent the stock of Tinder's parent company plummeting. It is also introducing upvotes and downvotes that let users vote on comments Reddit-style, and making Groups its own tab in the app.
But the public News Feed itself got very little attention. One of the only announcements directly concerning it was the ability to share augmented reality objects in posts with friends, the ultimate utility of which remains to be seen.
Part of this absence of news seems to be a result of the last news cycles of the last few months: Under intense pressure from both media and government, Facebook has been more focused on fixing the News Feed that exists, rather than promising any monumental changes to the technology.
But it also points to a broader shift in how Facebook is diversifying its business. The company is no longer a single, monolithic social network - it is a whole suite of disparate apps and service. While the core Facebook service still makes the lion's share of money for the company, Instagram is growing fast, and stands to contribute 18% of the company's overall revenues in 2018.
Facebook is now eyeing up the financial possibilities of its other apps. WhatsApp's changes open the door to larger businesses using the platform. The Oculus Go slowly nudges virtual reality closer to proper mainstream adoption, which brings with it the same kind of opportunities that Apple and Google enjoy with smartphones.
The last few years burned Facebook, and Zuckerberg and other executives now freely admit they weren't ready for how their platform would be misused. The ultimate result: Facebook seems to be focusing more on products that foster person-to-person and small-group communications, and moves away a little from the grand bazaar that is the News Feed.
By broadening its business, Facebook is making sure it isn't keeping all its eggs in its basket - and lessening its reliance on a product that has brought it no end of trouble.