Entrepreneurs get ready: Facebook f8 is coming

Developer conference always focuses on the social graph: will location and privacy be key issues?

Facebook on Thursday finally set the time, place and price for f8, the company’s yearly developer conference.

Mark your calendars for September 22, 2011--the event’s already less than a month away! As in past years, f8 will be held at the San Francisco Design Center on the corner of Brannan and 8th street. Registration costs $400 per attendee.

Here’s the main info we have from Facebook so far:

f8 is Facebook’s conference where developers, entrepreneurs and innovators building a more social web gather to learn, share and collaborate on social design and Facebook technologies.

At f8, members of the Facebook team and the developer community will explore a variety of topics including new tools, best practices and product Q&As with Facebook’s engineering and product teams. We hope you'll join us.

As for the agenda, Facebook has only posted a meager outline of the day’s events, from registration in the morning followed by a 10 AM keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg to the evening’s “After8 Celebration.”

Facebook has hosted f8 every year since 2007 (minus a missed year in 2009) and significant news has emerged from each, often related to the social graph and ways in which users connect via third-party websites and applications. The 2010 f8 was arguably one of the most important of any, as it was the year that Facebook unleashed social plugins (like the Like button) and the social graph API.

Since that April 2010 launch, an average of 10,000 new websites have integrated with Facebook daily. Today, more than 2.5 million websites have integrated and more than 250 million people take advantage of those integrations. Needless to say, the Facebook platform is a treasure trove for entrepreneurs and developers.

What one thing could be the biggest announcement from this year’s f8 is hard to say. We can expect that Facebook will have much to say about recent news that it has axed Places, the social network’s proprietary check-in service. In its place, Facebook wants to make location a part of everything, from status updates to... well, everything.

Even bigger than location, we can only hope, will be Facebook’s focus on privacy. In tandem with the network’s rise to prominence, the number of privacy controls given to users has grown lofty and hard to understand. In response to this, Facebook just announced some changes that should make those controls more powerful but also simpler.

We’ll see if they hold their developers to this same push toward transparency.