Facebook Sets A Date For Its Third f8 Conference. Expect Another Huge Announcement

Over the last few years, Facebook has held a semi-regular conference called f8, where hundreds of developers come to learn about the site’s development platforms. The event has also been home to the launches of Facebook’s most ground breaking products that have turned the site from “just” a social network into something far more powerful. Today, Facebook has announced the dates of the third f8: April 21-22 , in San Francisco.

In May 2007, Facebook used the event to launch Facebook Platform, which has spurred the creation of 500,000 Facebook apps to date. A year later, the second f8 saw the debut of Facebook Connect, which has since been used to integrate Facebook’s social graph with 80,000 sites (including TechCrunch). Suffice to say, we can probably expect something big coming this April.

Facebook’s blog post announcing the dates is unsurprisingly vague about what we can expect. The site actually actually mentioned the upcoming conference back in October, when it said would was coming in the “first half of 2010”. In that post, it offered some similarly vague details.

We have a lot of work to do between now and the next f8 conference in the first half of 2010 in San Francisco. Our third f8 will bring us back to our roots – building great technology and spurring innovation. We couldn’t be more excited about where we are going together. Facebook is a technology company and we want to provide you with the building blocks to start and change industries.

I’m guessing we’ll at least see its payments system roll out more broadly. But f8 may also be the place where Facebook launches its long-awaited geo-location support, for which developer support will be key.