Facebook Tidbits From Snap Summit In San Francisco

Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin gave the afternoon keynote talk today at the Snap Summit in San Francisco.

He revealed (or in some cased confirmed speculation around) a number of interesting tidbits about the Facebook business and upcoming products:

  1. Morin said Facebook Chat will launch next week. When the chat product was confirmed on March 18, Facebook would only say it would be launched “in the coming weeks.” Morin would not give a more specific launch date, so until we hear otherwise, the outside date is Saturday, April 5. See a video demo of chat here.
  2. Morin answered a question about whether Facebook would continue to give preferential treatment and bend rules designed to improve the user experience to revenue partners, as they did with the CBS March Madness application. Despite heavy user and developer backlash, Morin’s answer was “I can’t say it won’t happen again.”
  3. Morin said that the $10 million fbFund, set up by Facebook, Accel and Founders Fund, has now gone through two rounds of reviews with application developers and has made some investments (he wouldn’t say how many). He said that investments were between $25,000 and $250,000, with the average at $200,000.
  4. Someone asked if Facebook has any intention of supporting the OpenSocial standard for developers. He said they might in the future “if it becomes interesting.”
  5. Morin confirmed rumors that Facebook would be rolling out a payment system to allow developers to collect payments directly from users, sometime in the next 180 days. No additional details were given.
  6. There are close to 4 billion photos on Facebook.
  7. It’s estimated that 20% of Canada’s population is on Facebook.