Meta desperate? The F8 Developer Conference was suspended, and Xiao Za sprinted all out to sprint the meta-universe!

Reporting by XinZhiyuan

Edit: Editorial Office

【Introduction to New Zhiyuan】

At the 2022 Meta F8 Developer Conference, the "Pause button" was pressed, and in order to concentrate on the meta-universe, the "Zak Coin" was also developed.

This year, Meta's F8 Developer Conference is shut down again!

The reason seems simple - I am busy working on the "metacosm", and I don't have time.

Meta says it now needs a short break to tailor a new plan for the next chapter of the Internet, the metaverse.

Why not this year?

The name F8 is derived from Facebook's 8-hour hacking campaign.

After all, the core of Internet companies is programming, which is also the spiritual core of Facebook.

During the event, volunteer contestants gathered and spent the night lying in front of the screen, turning everything they thought into lines of code.

In the movie "The Social Network", Xiao Za holds a 10-minute coding competition in a dormitory at Harvard University, and the winner becomes his first intern.

The F8 Conference was opened in 2007, but it was suspended three times in 2009, 2012 and 2013 for various reasons. It has been held for 12 sessions.

In the first two years, there were some changes in the F8 conference, but it was because of the epidemic.

In 2020, Meta, which is still Facebook, announced the cancellation of the main offline venue of the F8 Developer Conference.

In 2021, the conference was renamed F8 Refresh and moved completely online.

However, the cancellation of F8 this year has nothing to do with the epidemic.

Meta gives the reason that more time will be invested in the metacosm.

However, Meta will launch a replacement, Conversations, on May 19. The goal is to bring together merchants, developers, and potential collaborators to connect business needs, all kinds of information, and build an information platform.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Meta's vision of a metaverse.

At last month's SXSW conference, former Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aimé scoffed at Meta's metaverse.

The dream of issuing coins is not extinguished, when the "Zach coin" is carried out

Focusing on the metaverse project not only means doing VR headsets, VR modeling, AI scene generators, natural language processing translation AI and other hardware and software projects, but also including the construction of a complete virtual social service project. The first to bear the brunt is the issuance of virtual banknotes.

Meta's proposed global cryptocurrency project, originally called "Libra" but eventually renamed "Diem," was a sensation.

However, this project has experienced twists and turns such as regulatory pressure, social doubts, name changes, and departures of responsible persons.

Facebook Financial, which oversees the matter, experienced massive personnel turmoil in 2021. The head of the department, David Marcus, the software engineer, the compliance officer and the legal team, almost all left.

After strong pressure from financial regulators around the world and internal setbacks within the project, Meta officially announced at the end of January 2022 that it would sell the project's patents, network services and other assets to cryptocurrency bank Silvergate for about $200 million, officially calling out the plan.

However, Zuckerberg is obsessed with e-commerce and financial instruments, and has not given up on the dream of issuing coins, which he believes is an essential part of the meta-universe he wants to build.

"Meta is looking for a way to issue digital currencies with the least regulatory pressure, and blockchain-based digital currencies are becoming their best bet," the people said.

Meta has reportedly recently been preparing to issue a new virtual token that it plans to circulate across its various app platforms, with internal employees nicknamed "Zuck Bucks."

However, this will not be the real final product name.

Allegedly, "ZaqCoin" is not a "cryptocurrency" that uses cryptography or blockchain, but an "In-app Token" or "virtual currency" issued by Meta and controlled centrally.

The Financial Times believes that Meta's issuance of "Zak Coins" is to refer to Roblox's experience in issuing Robux coins, so that Meta has a virtual currency common to its own meta-universe service scenes and games, which can be used for Instagram or Facebook community tips.

If the project goes well, Meta will create new revenue streams and increase control over future financial transactions in its apps, including Facebook, IG, WhatsApp and Quest virtual reality platforms.

In addition to "Zach coin", Meta is also studying the use of "social tokens" or "reputation tokens" on Facebook and Instagram to reward influencers who post on Facebook and Instagram.

In addition, Meta also intends to launch a "creator coins" that are linked to specific Instagram influencers.

However, all projects are still in the early planning stages and are "subject to change or abandonment at any time".

In fact, Meta has not completely abandoned blockchain finance. "We're changing our strategic course to promote whatsApp, Messenger payments, and helping creators tokenize their behavior." Stephane Kasriel, the new head of Meta's financial unit, said.

There was a preview that the test function would be launched in May, but it is still uncertain.

A Meta spokesperson said, "We are focusing on the development of the meta-universe, thinking about the possibilities of product innovation for a variety of users, including individuals, businesses and creators," which includes virtual payments and financial services.

In fact, this isn't the first time Meta has introduced virtual currency to the service, as early as 2009 it launched the virtual currency Facebook Credits, which allows users to make in-app purchases, often in page mini-games like FarmVille.

According to Barclays, at the time of the IPO in 2012, the virtual currency Facebook Credits accounted for 16% of the company's revenue, but it shut down the service in 2013 due to high maintenance costs.

It seems that on the road to the development of the metaverse, it is difficult for virtual currency alone to be smooth.

What Meta Developers do in 2021

Last year, Meta carried out a large number of interesting projects, and received help from developers around the world, and the open source ecosystem is getting bigger and bigger.

It can be said that without the help of the open source community, many achievements Meta cannot do.

Next, let's review how Meta's open source social platform participates in the community. These platforms include: Twitter, Youtube, Diff podcast, and Meta's official blog.

Meta also categorizes all open source project portfolios by technology domain, such as developer tools, programming languages, data and infrastructure, mobile, web, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. This shows you how Much of The Progress Meta's open source projects have made in 2021.

In terms of quantity alone, Meta has launched 231 new projects in 2021. Add in less active projects and some projects donated to the Foundation, for a total of 837.

In terms of the number of people involved in the project, 165163 people have already joined Meta's public projects in 2021, an increase of 20% over 2020. Of these people, 23,838 are not Meta employees, which shows how influential it is. The number of employees is also maintained at 141225.

In 2021, the number of Meta projects on Github accumulated 133854 stars, for a total of 1426541 stars. It can be seen that the Github community is becoming more and more interested in Meta's open source projects and is more and more willing to participate.

Meta said, "It is precisely because ordinary developers work together that the advancement of our open source projects has become possible."

Resources:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/04/06/pausing-f8-in-2022/