On Tuesday, Facebook launched its annual developers F8 conference in San Francisco where it showed off a mind-boggling array of new technology.
There were new bots in the Messenger app, new ways to stream live video, designs for a 360-degree camera being given away for free, virtual reality glasses, and drones.
It was a whole lot of cool stuff but it also felt scattered, as if Facebook is looking at every cool, new thing out there, and randomly jumping on it, even if the tech doesn't seem to be about online social networks (its main service) or selling ads (its main business).
As we previously reported, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off his 10-year-plan in a single chart that explained in the next three years, Facebook is focused on expanding its "ecosystems" meaning getting all sorts of people and businesses to use Facebook for all sorts of reasons.
In the next five years, it will spread its wings through multiple apps including Messenger, WhatsApp, Video, Search, Groups and Instagram.
And over the next 10 years, it will be working on "technologies." That 10-year plan is where all the far-flung things come in.
As for how this all fits together, Zuckerberg explained that in a single sentence in a Facebook post:
"Over the long run, we're building planes and satellites to connect everyone to the internet; artificial intelligence to help us interact with services more easily; and virtual reality to help us experience the world in a totally new way."
