Its showtime: Facebooks f8 conference set for Sept. 22

Facebook has begun sending out invites for its annual developer conference, f8, which will be held on September 22 in San Francisco. The invitation reads:

This all day event with Facebook engineers and product teams will feature keynotes and session tracks that highlight our new tools along with best practices for developers and partners building the next generation of social experiences.

Despite its tagline as a developer conference, f8 2011 is not likely to be your run-of-the-mill hacker meetup. As Om Malik reported here earlier this summer, Facebook has been very busy meeting with entertainment and media industry players, and is set to reveal some splashy new partnerships at this years f8.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking for months about how his company is keen to lend its social networking prowess to content providers. At the press event for Facebooks video chat partnership with Skype held last month, Zuckerberg said: The stuff thats going to get built in the next three to five years is going to be built on top of the infrastructure weve built. We have a lot of stuff along this theme over the next few months that were going to roll out.

One of the main contenders to announce a deeper Facebook integration at f8 is Spotify, the European music streaming service that made big waves when it laun! ched in the US last month. Facebook has been strengthening its ties with Hollywood as well: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is the newest member of Facebooks board of directors, and movie studio Miramax announced its first digital Facebook app earlier this week.

With Facebook firing on all cylinders since the launch of rival social network Google+ earlier this summer, its looking very likely that there will be a fair amount of stardust at this years f8 event.

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