Facebook Asks App Makers to Stake Bets on Oculus, Messenger
- Social network courts developers at its annual F8 conference
- Bots for Messenger, video streaming for VR headset lead lineup
People try the Oculus VR Inc. Go wireless virtual reality headsets.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergFacebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg spent the morning essentially explaining to an audience of app makers why it’s been so hard to work with his social network lately. Even as the relationship has become more fraught, there are still two bright spots: virtual reality and messaging.
A crisis that unfolded in recent weeks over Facebook’s sharing of personal user data with third parties led the company to shut down several of its tools for app makers, causing some of their businesses to break. One such function allows developers to make their apps more easily, by letting them automatically ingest certain data -- for example, login information. Now, at its F8 conference starting Tuesday in San Jose, California, Facebook will work to persuade those developers to keep building for its platform.