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Facebook Asks App Makers to Stake Bets on Oculus, Messenger

Facebook Asks App Makers to Stake Bets on Oculus, Messenger

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook 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.

First, Facebook is offering some relief. The company had stopped reviewing and approving new apps using Facebook’s developer tools while it figured out where to restrict its data sharing. On Tuesday, it will start that process back up again.

While Facebook’s main social media app has more than 2 billion users, there are two fledgling parts of the company that still rely deeply on app makers’ interest in building. Messenger, its global chat app, and Oculus, its virtual-reality headset division, both offer new opportunities for developers to make their mark.

Messenger

Facebook Messenger has more than 200,000 developers building for it, according to David Marcus, head of the division. He wants them to keep building software-based chat bots for companies to communicate with their users, and said the number of individual bots on Messenger has tripled, to 300,000.

The company said that those programmers will now be able to build in-app video demonstrations of their products, sometimes by overlaying them directly on a user’s live video of themselves. For example, makeup retailer Sephora could let people try different shades of eyeshadow and lipstick on their actual faces, while in conversation with the brand via Messenger, and send the options to their friends as they show up in the chat. Or Nike could launch a new shoe, with a 360-degree view of the sneaker.

“In the vast majority of cases where you want to build a rich experience like this, you have to build an app,” Marcus said. Now Facebook is making it possible to build those tools within Messenger.

Messenger is also enabling translation services in chat, which will let users have conversations with people and brands in other countries. It will employ the same translation tools that Facebook uses in the news feed.

The Messenger app wasn’t spared from the privacy checkups Facebook did across its whole business, Marcus said. Those audits resulted in some changes. Some developers who provide technical support for multiple businesses had to sign new contracts, saying that they can’t use data from one business in their services with another.

“The identity you have with one brand should only be available to the brand, and not cross-referenced,” Marcus said. “We just want to make sure.”

Oculus Go

Facebook will finally start selling its cordless virtual reality headset -- Oculus Go will be available in 23 countries on Tuesday. To lure a more mainstream audience than past headsets, the company needs developers to think beyond gaming.

The limited accessibility of VR headsets so far -- mainly because of high prices and the need to be strapped to an external Windows-based personal computer -- has meant that VR developers weren’t able to reach a broad customer base, holding back sales. But at $200, the Oculus Go will be far cheaper than rival devices and doesn’t need to be tied to a smartphone or PC. Facebook declined to say whether it’s making any money off of the headset.

The Oculus Go, which will come pre-loaded with an application and game store, is designed to do what the iPhone did for smartphone apps a decade ago. Facebook says that more than 1,000 apps, games, and movies will be available to download on the headset. That includes apps from streaming-video services Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, not just games. Oculus executives said they expect the device will draw consumers who live with roommates and want to watch a different show than what’s playing on the TV, or people who want to take a portable entertainment device on planes.

Facebook has been wooing developers with the headset for months, after announcing it last year and then giving test units to some app makers. At F8, Facebook will unveil several new apps for the device, including Oculus Venues and Oculus TV. The Venues app allows users to virtually watch a live event, while the TV app -- like the one on the iPhone and iPad -- serves as a launchpad to various television offerings.

Another app, Oculus Rooms, will let four people virtually hang out in a customizable, living room-like space, and will allow them to play table games like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit within that environment.

Oculus is keeping its focus on virtual reality even as other major technology companies, including Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., place their bets on augmented reality as the potentially bigger market. Augmented reality combines virtual images with real-world ones, instead of encompassing users in a completely simulated environment. Facebook has in the past asked developers to build augmented-reality tools for other parts of its business, like the short ephemeral videos that compete with Snapchat Stories.

There are some drawbacks to developing for Oculus Go. The headset can only run for 1.5 to 2 hours on a single battery charge for gaming, and up to 2.5 hours for watching video. That’s a limited amount of playing time, which could hurt a consumer’s connection to a developer’s app. There’s also a health and safety warning, asking users not to stay immersed in the headset for more than 30 minutes because of the risk of becoming nauseous. Oculus doesn’t prevent people from using it for longer.

To contact the reporters on this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.net, Mark Gurman in San Francisco at mgurman1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz

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