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Facebook reveals the date of its next F8 developer conference

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Facebook has announced the dates and location for its next developer conference.

F8, the company's annual developer conference, will kickoff April 18, 2017 in San Jose, the social network announced Wednesday. 

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The conference will last two days and promises to include the usual mix of executive keynotes, product demos and developer sessions, though we likely won't hear additional details from Facebook until much closer to the event. 

2017 is also notable in that it will be the first time the company has hosted the event outside of San Francisco. Instead, the conference will take place at San Jose's McEnery Convention Center. With so few details form Facebook, it's hard to say for sure, but the venue change could signal the social network plans the event to be bigger than previous years. The San Jose Convention Center has a capacity of well over 20,000 so it could accommodate a much larger crowd than San Francisco's Fort Mason Center, which has hosted the event the last two years. (Facebook says "more than 2,600" developers attended last year.)

Regardless of attendance, though, F8 is always one of the company's biggest events of the year. Facebook has previously used F8 to launch its bot platform and open up Messenger to developers, and there are always a boatload of new developer tools announced. Facebook also uses F8 to showcase updates on other initiatives like Internet.org.