Major risks but bigger rewards in tech developer conferences
Mark Zuckerberg entered the throng of developers smiling.
It was the first day of Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, and the CEO had just finished extolling Facebook’s innovations in messaging, augmented and virtual reality and social networking. As conference goers gawked at Zuckerberg, clad in a sweatshirt and jeans, outside the main convention hall, he extended his hand to greet people face-to-face.
This, developers said, is the reason they go to conferences: to press the flesh with the executives, engineers and other people who create the technology so many of them rely on to build the tools, apps and products they sell.
It’s a non-virtual reality that augments what they do.
Nor is it a one-way street. Companies rely on developers to fill in the gaps in their products, seize opportunities too small or distracting for big tech firms to dwell on, and lure people into their embrace. What’s an app store without apps, after all?
For Facebook, which sees more than 2 billion people using its website, mobile apps and other online tentacles each month, developers may no longer be crucial for adding to those numbers. But apps that rely on Facebook to authenticate users and spread the word certainly help keep Zuckerberg’s production at the top of the social heap.
“When you have an active user base that’s close to a quarter of the world’s population, you only have so many places to go,” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with Altimeter who attended last week’s F8 conference.
Though they both need the other, the relationship between tech developers and companies is not always so simple — or nice.
Twitter has not held a developer conference since 2015, largely due to tensions between the social media company and developers.
At its last convention, which was called Flight, CEO Jack Dorsey took the stage and promised developers that the company would work to “reset” its relationship with outside innovators. But since then, Twitter has severed even more ties with them.
This year, the company sold Fabric, the platform on which developers could build tools and services using Twitter, to Google.
The lack of a strong relationship — or any relationship, really — with developers contributes to Twitter’s sustained mediocrity, according to analysts and industry insiders. The company has been unable to substantially increase revenue or attract a significant number of new users for nearly two years.
Last week, Intel announced that its annual developer conference, known as IDF, would be “retired” after nearly 20 years. The company said only that Intel is moving on from being a computer-centric company to focusing more on data and new technology.
People who may have planned to go to IDF this year were instead offered online resources and a promise of more specifically tailored events to come.
Snap Inc., one of Facebook’s main competitors, has not opened up its Snapchat app to developers or offered a platform on which outside engineers can build.
This, several developers at F8 asserted, may ultimately lead to Snap’s undoing.
Facebook, which has tried to buy Snapchat more than once, has since opted to unabashedly copy the company’s main feature of its social network: a camera that uses augmented reality and filters to alter photos posted on the app.
“Facebook has this army of developers that it’s allowing to use its (augmented reality) camera platform for free, and that army is going to destroy Snapchat,” said Felipe Servin, 31, co-founder of Yo Amo Media, a Miami company. “It’s brilliant if you think about it: Snapchat is doing it all by themselves. They don’t have an army. Facebook does. Facebook has us.”
But these conferences do not come cheap for companies or developers. That’s why the return on investment must be clear.
For Facebook, which has hosted developer conferences since 2007 — though not every year — it has been, Etlinger said.
“Developers are out there building tools that people are going to use in the context of Facebook, and that will make Facebook even more engaging, time-consuming and appealing to its audience,” she said. “It’s a very strategic event.”
Apttus, a financial tech firm in San Mateo, has been holding an annual convention for its customers and developers since 2013. In its fourth year, the early May event, called Accellerate, is expected to draw about 3,000 to San Francisco’s Pier 48. It will cost the financial-tech firm a third of its annual marketing budget.
But, said Chief Marketing Officer Maria Pergolino, there’s little else that can replicate the experience of a conference.
“We feed everyone with food trucks, we have a wall you can color on, a place where you can do graffiti,” she said. “We try to create an atmosphere for engagement, so when you’re standing next to a person, it’s networking, but mixed with interactive experiences . ... It’s just not good enough to just grab one of your internal people and have them talk at a crowd for a couple hours. But do it right, and, for us at least, it pays off in a big way.”
Out on the floor in the main hall of F8, developers lounged in beanbag chairs, chatted with each other over free ice cream bars, served from freezers wheeled in around midday, and tried out Facebook’s new toys: virtual reality headsets, augmented reality cameras, robots and codes that interact with users on Messenger, Facebook’s chat application.
The conference, which Facebook held at the San Jose Convention Center after years of hosting it in San Francisco, was not without bumps, however.
Several developers said they were locked out of popular sessions that filled up sooner than anyone expected. Without these sessions, developer conferences lose a lot of their value, some said.
“I paid out of pocket to be here,” said Paris Butterfield, 27, a back-end developer at LexisNexis in Raleigh, N.C., who spent nearly $1,800 to cover the costs of attendance. “It’s been great to be here and meet people, to hear Facebook’s future vision — because other companies, like Apple, don’t do that — but it is frustrating when you’ve been looking forward to a session and then they tell you sorry, it’s all full.”
Others said that, compared with previous Facebook conferences, this year’s F8 felt disjointed — less of Facebook explaining its vision for the short-term future while showing developers how they could innovate using the platform, and more of Facebook showing off flashy, big-picture, far-future ideas.
The keynote speech on the second day, typically reserved for technical talks designed for developers rather than big-picture ideas polished for the assembled media, focused largely on Facebook’s secret Building 8 innovations, including an effort to connect human brains to computers, using optical imaging that would scan a person’s brain 100 times per second.
“It feels to me like the presentations they made this year are more focused on the media and getting their attention than on us,” said Servin, the co-founder from Miami. “It feels less geeky, and maybe it’s just because I’m an engineer, but I didn’t find it as impressive.”
“It’s brilliant if you think about it: Snapchat is doing it all by themselves. They don’t have an army. Facebook does. Facebook has us.” Felipe Servin, co-founder, Yo Amo Media