Facebook names its favorite in-house hackathon projects
They include a more robust Safety Check and Android instant verification.
Facebook is ending 2016 by naming its favorite projects and products that came out of all the hackathons its offices worldwide hosted this year. One is a richer, more robust Safety Check: a team tweaked the feature (which was itself the product of a hackathon) to allow people to embed more context, pictures and calls to actions within notifications. Another team created sort of an extension for it that gave people a way to offer and look for resources such as food and water in emergency situations.
A hackathon in Seattle gave rise to instant verification for Android, which launched earlier this month. That feature verifies your number for apps and websites if it's the same as the phone you're using without having to wait for a verification code via SMS. There's also another team in Seattle created a live-streaming experience within Messenger. The other entries in Facebook's list are the Voyager transponder, created in an effort to make sure the world's internet infrastructure can handle an increase in traffic going forward.
Finally, a team who participated at a hackathon in New York created a feature called "adaptive attachments," which might give users a way to upload photos to a shared album, create crowdsourced videos and play multiplayer games simply by commenting on a post someday. Since hackathons produce so many great products (and potential features) for the social network, we're pretty sure we'll see more of them in 2017.
