Mark Zuckerberg gave us a glimpse of what the social giant could be bringing to Facebook next year, and it’s very cool indeed.

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook Live to show off some cool features that were keeping the Facebook team busy this year: some cool features that we could see on Facebook in 2017 and beyond, which include location requesting, GIFs as comments, and more.

Facebook’s Oculus Touch controllers are well-received by critics all over the world, some even calling them “the best virtual reality controllers so far.” Facebook isn’t stopping there, but they are already hard at work making the Oculus Touch even better. Mark Zuckerberg showed a demo device – a modified version of the current Oculus Touch – which physically changes its temperature depending on your virtual interaction. For instance, if you are hovering over a fire in your virtual reality like Zuckerberg was, the controllers will get physically warm. Isn’t that awesome?

There are also some big changes that might be coming to the Facebooks social experience itself. Zuckerberg showed a new feature in Messenger, where you can request someone’s precise location. He explained that this “builds on the safety check work” that the company has done. This idea takes the current emergency check-in process one step further. After all, social media is playing an increasingly bigger role in emergency situations.

But personally, as I am in India, here when a natural disaster happens there is only 10% probability that the mobile networks will be up and running as the electricity would be the first one to be affected. In such cases, we should wait and see how much the emergency check-in process would translate all over the world.

Next up: more GIFs. If you love using GIFs in Messenger, you are going to love this – in the near future, you may be able to use GIFs as comments. Thanks to Giphy and Riffsy, users will be able to find the right GIF just like in Messenger and post it as a comment. Personally, I am against Gif in facebook. This reminds me of the scrapbook in Orkut.

The last of the demoed features is an AI-based shared albums feature. Essentially, the machine recognizes what you want (i.e. photos from the wedding) and gathers all the relevant photos and videos and creates an album for everyone to see.  A feature which O would wait to be in place.

Although these are not confirmed features, it is highly likely that we will see at least some of them next year – we will make sure to keep you updated!


 

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