conferences

SAN FRANCISCO--As part of its unveiling of its "Open Graph" product suite at the F8 developer conference here, Facebook is getting rid of the standalone "Facebook Connect" product that it unveiled at the last F8 two years ago.

"We are actually eliminating the Facebook Connect brand," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a press conference following his keynote address. "We figured that 'Connect' is not descriptive for users."

Facebook director of platform product Bret Taylor chimed in. "Facebook Connect was just an initiative to have [the] Facebook log-in work on external Web … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company's F8 developer conference on Wednesday to unveil what he said is "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the Web." It's called the Open Graph.

There was no introduction: Zuckerberg just walked onstage in jeans, sneakers, and a black hoodie and started talking about Facebook's past F8 launches. In 2007, it was the original Facebook Platform. In 2008, it was Facebook Connect.

There are now more than 400 million people on Facebook, four times as many as there were the last time … Read more

I once got into a debate with someone over the proper pronunciation of "F8," the name of Facebook's sort-of-annual developer conference.

I pronounced F8 as the letter F followed by the number 8, saying I believed the name referred to the fact that the event involved an eight-hour "hackathon" right after the original debut of Facebook's groundbreaking developer platform. My partner in conversation, himself a developer, said he'd assumed it was pronounced "fate." Correct or not, he had the right idea. The logo for F8 2010, appropriately enough, depicts a tiny F next to a massive 8 in a black circle that evokes the fortune-telling billiard ball of yore sitting atop a complex map of what appear to be random points and connections.

This year, more than ever, F8 is going to be Facebook's pitch to developers, advertisers, and the world: You are destined to be part of our Web, and our universe.

Though the company's formal libretto of announcements has yet to be released, all signs point to F8 2010 as a place where Facebook will chart its next great land grab, asserting its impending dominance over online niches the company does not yet control. There may be an announcement about geolocation, the GPS-fueled craze that's currently owned by start-up Foursquare. There will likely be more news about "Credits," Facebook's gaming-focused virtual currency system.

There is expected to be further detail about the "universal 'like' button" or toolbar that Facebook plans to release to third-party publishers, and probably more about "Community Pages," a curious new feature that Facebook announced earlier this week.

Facebook wants to be everywhere. The "like" button announcement signifies that Facebook Connect, the big product release from F8 2008 (there wasn't one in '09--no reason given), just wasn't enough when it comes to Facebook's presence across the Web. It's also got fresh competition from Twitter, which may prove to be Facebook's strongest competitor since it tasked itself with unseating MySpace in market share. At one point, everyone expected Facebook's eventual big rival to be Google, which instead has tallied a history of social-media missteps.

Last week, Twitter held its first-ever developer conference, called Chirp, and all signs point to the microblogging company evolving far beyond a parade of 140-character messages from tech pundits, celebrities, and news outlets. Twitter plans to launch metadata annotations, a geolocation directory, its own URL shortener, and potentially more internal applications like the mobile clients it announced for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Facebook's response to Twitter's growth: Grow bigger. That's what we'll be seeing at F8.… Read more

Being the 800-pound gorilla in the social games room, it's no surprise that there are a lot of gripes about Farmville publisher Zynga.

Usually, people inside an industry with strong feelings about a specific company keep those sentiments to themselves because they don't want to burn bridges. So what might surprise some is how easy it is to find games industry professionals with an ax to grind about Zynga. Those tend to have to do with issues ranging from the company's propensity to imitate others' game concepts to a perception that it is both insensitive to the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--For game developers whose industry experience predates not just Facebook but even Mark Zuckerberg, you might expect that abandoning making big, complex games for simple titles like Farmville and similar social projects would be anathema.

But to hear a panel of respected industry veterans who spoke before a packed house in a huge room at the Game Developers Conference here Tuesday, the truth is exactly the opposite. In fact, to these four speakers at least, this may be the opporunity of a lifetime--making a transition from working on $25 million console-level games that take years to build to small … Read more

BOSTON--The MIT Energy Conference here on Saturday covered a little bit of everything--"China speed," climate change, financing gaps, government policy, nuclear and natural gas, and, of course, science experiments--as entrepreneurs, business people, and academics tried to get their arms around big-picture energy challenges.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has become a hotbed for clean-energy innovation over the past four years, attracting students and faculty to the field, some of whom have spun out promising companies.

At a showcase there, local companies and researchers working in wind, solar, biofuels, storage, and efficiency displayed some of their ongoing work. … Read more

If you had any doubts that the iPhone must now be considered one of the world's most important gaming platforms, this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco will try to put them to rest once and for all.

For years, GDC, as it's known, has hosted two days of "summits" early in the week, before the main keynote address and the bulk of the panels and sessions begin, including the longstanding GDC Mobile, which dealt with just about every issue a developer could want on mobile and handheld devices.

And this year is no … Read more

BOSTON--If the green-tech industry had its equivalent of the iPhone, it would be the electric car, a product that has cachet with consumers. But it's still unclear what will drive sales of plug-ins: will it be consumers willing to pay more for a greener ride or government mandates for fuel efficiency?

Speakers on a panel about electric vehicles on Saturday at the MIT Energy Conference said that both consumers and government policies will drive electric and plug-in hybrid car adoption. But they also expect electric cars will be premium products desired both because they are cleaner than gasoline-only cars … Read more

Update: Things are running a little late. It should be starting around 10:30 a.m. PST.

YouTube is holding a press conference at 10 a.m. PST Thursday and we'll be there live with photos and text updates of whatever it is.

Details are scarce at the moment, but we know for sure it won't be related to mobile phones or movies. That opens up the door for a number of things including new Test Tube features, more TV shows, and that whole live streaming thing which was rumored to be coming out sometime in 2008.

As … Read more