Facebook's F8 Developer Conference kicks off today

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off this year's Facebook F8 Developer conference which is available now as a live stream at f8.facebooklive.com. Focusing on the evolution of Facebook from a single application/service to a family of apps (they now own Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus Rift and have Messenger), the social network needs to navigate the evolving waters of how people prefer to use the service. 

"Going back five years, Facebook was about text and status updates. Now it is all about photos and fast-forward to the future, it will be video and maybe VR (virtual reality) and AR (Augmented Reality)," Zuckerberg stated during his keynote. Video, new user features as well as how Facebook can evolve and monetize its various properties for its developers will be some of the key points of this year's developer's conference. 

Other announcements include expanded features in Messenger Platform to connect directly with businesses instead of calling them up by phone. 

Facebook might introduce an Android dialer with call blocking capability

While Facebook Home wasn’t much of a success, they aren’t done experimenting with its mobile apps. A leaked screenshot from Android Police shows the existence of an Android-only dialer app. Its unique feature is that it shows you information about who’s calling you and automatically blocks calls from numbers you commonly block. The app is called Phone but Facebook won’t talk more details about it at the moment.

Source: The Verge

You don’t have to define your gender on Facebook anymore

Last year social network Facebook worked with GLAAD to generate custom genders, such as transgender and cisgender, but it wasn’t universally well-received because users were still boxed in by pre-selected options. Facebook seems to have scrapped that and now has a custom gender field. It still populates suggestions as you type but you can put in whatever gender you want to represent yourself on the site, similar to the “infinite” gender options on Google+. Aside from that, you can choose the pronoun you want to be called on the site. You can even tweak your privacy settings for gender if you just want a select audience that can see your gender. There isn’t any word though how fast the roll out of the option is. So best keep your eye out for it.

Source: The Verge

Microsoft to take out Facebook and Google chat from Outlook.com

Microsoft is encouraging its users to use Skype more on Outlook.com. The company sent out emails to Outlook users that they plan to remove Facebook and Google chat integration in the site. They won’t specify why they took out Facebook chat. But for Google Talk they said it was “due to Google’s decision to discontinue the chat protocol used by the Google Talk platform.”

If you’re worried about your Facebook and Google contacts synced with the webmail service, you don’t have to be. Microsoft said that the feature won’t be affected by the discontinuation of the chat options.

Source: The Verge