Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that Google and Facebook weren’t talking much. The two seem to be getting closer thanks to Android, though, and that catalyst will be bringing Facebook to Google I/O in May.
Facebook announced this week that its Facebook Developers group will be setting up shop at Google I/O. The team obviously won’t have any official presence at the show itself, but it will be hosting a Google I/O kick off party on the day before the conference. The team will also be on the conference floor during the week to talk with developers about app discovery on Facebook:
“…members of the Facebook team will also be there to help you learn how Facebook can drive app discovery in a crowded marketplace, and keep people interested and coming back to your app.”
If you can’t make it out to Google I/O, developers will have another chance to pick the minds of Facebook team members at AnDevCon Boston on May 28. The Facebook team will be hosting a number of talks covering topics like Home, Facebook’s Android app and the Android SDK:
Join Facebook Home engineers Will Bailey and Luke St. Clair for a keynote on Tuesday evening about our new user experience on Android. We’ll talk about why we built Home, how we designed its UI, and how we optimized battery and data usage. We’ll have a few technical deep dives, and will share some insights about how we built the product to be centered around people.
Our first class session, by Android team engineers Frank Qixing Du and Mark Peng, covers the native rewrite of Facebook for Android and the major performance challenges the team faced. They’ll talk about app design, GC and memory optimization, view optimization, and what techniques and tools you can use to make your Android app more performant.
For those of you building apps that use Facebook, we’ll have two workshops about the basics of our Android SDK, and advanced tips to make your apps and the stories people publish from them sticky. We’ll be around throughout the conference to chat and answer any questions you have about your integration.
It’s nice to see Facebook embracing Android, but I personally can’t wait to see what it does with Google Glass. Google will probably showcase some Google+ stuff on Glass at Google I/O, but we might get a sneak peek at Facebook on Google Glass at AnDevCon.