Facebook's Zuck Live from London

SAN FRANCISCO - APRIL 21: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the opening keynote address at the f8 Developer Conference April 21, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Zuckerberg kicked off the the one day conference for developers that features breakout sessions on the future of social technologies. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

London does seem to be very much on the radar of the US-based tech heavyweights, seeing visits from both Zuckerberg and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joins the line-up for The Guardian's Activate summit later this month (10% discount for Chinwaggers).

Today's Special Edition of the Facebook Developer Garage plays host to Facebook's top brass including grand fromage Mark Zuckerberg, Joanna Shields, VP of Sales and Business Development, EMEA and Ethan Beard, Director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Tickets for the event at The Barbican disappeared quicker than you can say vuvuzela, but with the event will be streamed live and with this crowd, expect frequent updates on Faceback and <cough> Twitter (#fdgl). The live stream is up on Ustream and available below.

Live Video streaming by Ustream

Update: Nice write-up of the event from Media Guardian and I'm sure there'll be lots later. Having dipped in-and-out on the live stream it was good to see the focus on the positive aspects of personalisation and a switch to OAuth and easier access to the data being produced from their Open Graph platform.

Notable omissions dodging of a question about the possible extension of Facebook's Ads platform onto Google Adsense's turf!

The FT's Digital Correspondent, Tim Bradshaw, tweeted lots of juicy tidbits from the event (follow him - @tim):

  • Over 1bn Facebook Like buttons served every day (link)
  • Gaming is huge on Facebook: 200m monthly players, playing average of 4 diff games. 24 games have over 10m monthly users (link)
  • Facebook now has over 26m active users in the UK,10m in Germany, 10m in Spain, 16m in Italy and 15m in France (link)
  • Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's geo-location plans: "We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon." (link)
  • 350,000 sites now using Facebook's social plugins, 3 months after launch (link)