Even Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t keep a straight face.

The Facebook founder and chief executive repeatedly broke out in laughter as he announced a product roadmap for his company’s new “privacy-focused social platform” at its annual developer conference, F8, in San Jose on Tuesday.

“Now look, I get that a lot of people aren’t sure that we’re serious about this,” Zuckerberg said, through skittish guffaws. “I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly. But I’m committed to doing this well.”

This, he went on to explain, was a major overhaul of Facebook’s core products, including “re-plumbing the whole infrastructure”, to fulfill Zuckerberg’s new thesis statement: “The future is private.”

The endgame for this overhaul – the integration of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram messages into a single product with end-to-end encryption, as Zuckerberg announced in March – is still years away.

But during his keynote address Tuesday, Zuckerberg put a bit more flesh on the bones of the plan. Messenger had been rewritten from scratch, he announced, with new mobile and desktop apps and a “friends” tab that brings Instagram stories and Facebook posts into the app.

The company has also entirely redesigned the Facebook app – “The app isn’t even blue any more!” – and plans to launch a redesigned desktop webpage later this year. The redesign places the focus on Facebook groups, the semi-private, interest-based message boards that Zuckerberg has long touted as an example of how Facebook can help build social infrastructure in an increasingly fragmented world.

Amid Zuckerberg’s discussion of a privacy-focused platform being designed for “a sense of intimacy”, many of the product announcements focused on the ability to carry out secure financial transactions. For a company planning to pivot away from the core way it makes money (harvesting data for targeted advertising), the move into e-commerce and payments was expected.

WhatsApp is piloting a payments product in India, Zuckerberg revealed, with a typically Zuckerbergian attempt to make a moral principle out of a business decision: “I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it should be to send a photo,” he said.

Instagram is expanding its e-commerce options, with a new “Shopping” panel in its “explore” section and a pilot program to allow users to buy products directly from influencer posts. Influencers involved in the test (whom Instagram is confusingly referring to as “creators”) include Kim Kardashian West, Kylie Jenner and Gigi Hadid.

Zuckerberg also announced that Portal, the smart screen for video chatting launched last fall, will be available internationally later this year, and will start supporting WhatsApp calls in addition to Messenger.

And Oculus will begin shipping its two new products, Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest, on 21 May. Both will start at $399.

The F8 conference has traditionally been a venue for unveiling new concepts and products, such as 2010’s debut of Graph API (application programming interface), which allowed third-party developers to access Facebook user data – the original sin behind so many of Facebook’s privacy and data problems today.

Last year’s conference was held in the immediate aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, which were a direct result of Graph API’s extreme permissiveness with regards to user data. At that event, Zuckerberg announced a new dating service, which remains in testing in a few countries, and a “clear history” tool, which has yet to be rolled out.