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March 10, 2008
Zuckerberg Gets a Second Chance
I just got back from the Pangaea Lounge in Austin, where Facebook is hosting their "developer garage" party. The event was originally intended to be a series of presentations over food and booze about the Facebook platform and applications, but all of that changed after yesterday's disastrous keynote with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The audience was furious at the interviewer's flirtatious presentation and constant interruption of Zuckerberg, and it's caused quite a storm over the last 24 hours.
So earlier today, Facebook announced that Zuckerberg would participate in the developer garage and take questions on any topic from the audience. I went over there around 3pm and stood in the rain with scores of other people, until we got inside, where we were greeted by an open bar and a nice appetizer spread. For the first hour there was a series of presentations, but quite a number of people in the room were there solely for Zuckerberg.
When he came on stage around 4:30pm local time, he was relaxed and in a good mood. Without an interviewer managing him, he seem much more at ease with himself, fielding a variety of questions from the audience. For example, when asked about sharing user data with the government, he explained that Facebook is still committed to privacy but must also comply with applicable laws. In the case of China, one thing they're considering is not maintaining servers there, which would protect them from having to either reveal private user info on demand of the Chinese government or break local law by not doing so.
Another audience member asked Zuck about whether he would commit to working with any social network of more than 25 million members regarding data portability. Zuckerberg refused on the grounds of privacy. He explained that while he embraced openness philosophically, you can't always know the motivations behind other companies, and did not want to expose Facebook users to additional spam, etc. He also noted they plan to change the way apps developers can allow users to send out messages to others. Rather than imposing an artificial limit like 20 users at a time, the limit would be based on how the FB user community trusted the app. If it was well trusted, users would be able to send to larger numbers of people. If it's a spam trap, they would clamp down on it and impose harsher limits.
I still don't think he adequately addressed yesterday's keynote, though. He fielded just one question on the topic, and said that the problem was that the audience was frustrated with the fact that they couldn't ask questions until the very end. That may be true, but he audience was frustrated by the tenor of the interview from the very beginning. But I suppose it wouldn't have been good form for Zuck to say that the interviewer did a poor job, right? -andy
Update: I've posted my notes from the Zuckerman Q&A after the jump. They're culled from all of my Twitter posts from the event. -andy
Zuckerberg is about to come up on stage.
Zuck: "Yesterday's Q&A wasn't enough fun."
Zuck: "We can talk about whatever you want today."
First question was about API access. Zuck: "We're allowing people to map out who they're friends are... communicate thru a set of services."
Zuck: "In terms of that whole architecture, the wall is a social application... Exposing core information, like news feed..."
man he talks fast)
Q: Yesterday's keynote. reaction?
Zuck: "We were planning this event before then. One piece of feedback was that we didn't open it up to questions early enough."
Zuck: People were more interested in policy, tech questions, etc. That's why I'm doing this today.
Q on FB vs. Myspace. Zuck: The applications are very different. FB is about communicating more efficiently; it's not a media property.
Zuck: we don't measure how much time people spend on facebook.
Q: What happens when you become too connected, all relationships become flat?
Zuck: the frame thru which we're thinking is how facebook fits into your life, not the other way around.
Zuck: as time goes on, the avg # of friends increase... So we're working on more granular privacy controls - creating groups, etc. from web
Zuck: the average # of friends users have is around 150: the Dunbar number. FB helps you connect with people who aren't your closest friends
Zuck: as time goes on, the avg # of friends increase... So we're working on more granular privacy controls - creating groups, etc.
Zuck: The quickest group of info growing on the web is stuff you want to share with some people, but not everyone.
Zuck: it's not the solution to all the world's probs but it'll help people share info.
Q: plans for commerce? OpenSocial?
Zuck: No, I won't commit to working with any other soc net with 25 mil members or more. Though we're philosophically aligned....
...to data portability. Over time we're taking steps to share info on FB and elsewhere.
Zuck: Beacon is a part of the platform program; people don't always realize that.
Zuck: The best we can say now is that we're philosophically aligned to making it happen, but we don't know what others will be doing.
Zuck on commerce: We're mostly just offering commerce tools as a service to dev folks; we'll see where it goes.
Zuck on privacy/govt sharing: Protecting people's private info is a really important thing to do. So we're not openly working with govs...
But we have to follow the law. We're trying to figure out how to deal with China, like having no servers there....
...It's not a great set of tradeoffs.
Carmen from mediabistro: how does FB success affect your personal relationships?
Zuck: interesting topic for a developer garage.
Zuck: I have a small group of friends and I'm close with them. Building a company has been interesting, some strain, but it's been cool.
Icanhascheeseburger is here! His Q: Friends have stopped using fb. Why do you think it's happening?
zuck: an increasing amount of FB experience is platform experience....
zuck: one of the issues we've had is that we've aligned people's incentives poorly. Policies reward people for installing apps, not trust
zuck: instead of having limits like 20 friends to send to at a time, allow apps with real value to exceed those limits.
zuck: if users find an app spammy, we'll dial down their ability to send out notifications to multiple users
Q: for timeframe for outside services beyond fb.
zuck: additions to the beacon program, API. Eventually give people access to everything, but need to do it and avoid having lots of spam
zuck: A lot of the work people are doing is gonna be valuable, but I don't know when these privacy issues will be solved. 6-12 months, maybe
Scoble is talking about getting booted off of facebook briefly.
zuck: In news feed, if you share info and change privacy settings, it leaves others' news feed. With RSS, that wouldn't be possible.
zuck: i don't think anyone knows the answer at this point. That's why I can't commit to other soc net efforts. Openness is good, but...
we need to respect user base's privacy, so there's much to sort out.
zuck: it was your scraping, @scobleizer, that caused the problem, and we did reinstate you.
Scoble: but most users who get booted can't come back. Will you change that policy? Zuck: sorry I didn't hear that. Just kidding.
zuck: there's an appeals process so I'm not sure if it's true that people can't get back into the site.
Q: Palestine isn't represented as a country, groups have been closed.
zuck: our policy is to follow country list the US govt recognizes. We're not in the biz of defining what's a country and what's not.
zuck: but eventually as we let people map out their own networks hopefully this won't be much of an issue.
Q: you have apps for following congressmen, etc. What about making it even more local - state/municiple?
zuck: we'd like to see more stuff like that to exist, but we'd like the community to build it.
zuck: it's not the most efficient thing for us to build it. It's pretty likely someone else would do a better job than we could.
Zuck: thanks for coming. (applause)
A few more presenters, but tons of people are bailing. Nick from soc media, Chris from Causes.
Might leave the event soon. What's everyone up to? Anyone going to the EFF party?
...but he said the prob with the keynote was just the lack of time for audience questions. That doesn't explain away the first 45 mins.
Tags: Facebook | Mark Zuckerberg | sxsw
Posted by acarvin at March 10, 2008 6:28 PM
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