Quick comments live from F8

The Facebook F8 conference is underway and its quite the collection of folks.  There is twittering, blogging, live video streaming all happening at the same time.  It was a bit insane.  More people were looking down at their laptops typing than actually watching the speaker talk. Here are just a couple of thoughts I had during the keynote:

  • Regardless of his net worth, Zuckerberg is a terrible public speaker
  • They need to hire someone that can scroll through slides properly
  • There are now 90 million Facebook users
  • 2/3 of the users are international
  • Their approach on internationalization is right on and they are releasing the tool to all application developers.  That’s exciting if Facebook can continue to push into international markets.
  • 400,000 developers
  • New profiles isn’t that awesome and there were obvious issues with the rollout
  • Facebook Connect demos were exciting — Digg, Citysearch, Sixapart
  • Lots of guiding principles for application develpment — no more spammy apps
  • New developer website released
  • New verification and great apps program released — makes a ton of sense

Overall, very cool.

Registered for Facebook F8 ’08

I’ve taken a moment to sign up for F8 ’08.  Unfortunately, I was not able to attend last year because of a business trip to Europe but this time I’m in town.  A number of my friends and ex-coworkers will be in attendance representing their new companies.  It will be interesting to see what they unveil this year to try to top last year.

If you’re going to be attending the event, let me know and we can meet up.