 Zuckerberg Gets a Redo
By this point, if you're following my blog or twitter stream, you know about the disaster that was billed as the "Mark Zuckerberg Keynote" at the South by Southwest Conference (SXSW.) If you aren't, you can catch up pretty quickly by looking at any of the stories on Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMetrics.
So here is my take. There was a lot of yelling, screaming and hand wringing at Facebook Corporate last night. Sherly Sandberg (new FB COO who came over from Google) and the Microsoft gang probably had a come to Jesus with the FB PR team and said "FIX THIS and FIX IT NOW." A back channel call was likely made to Scoble and next thing you know, a "Zuckerberg redo" party shows up at the same place -- Pangaea -- that FB held it's SXSW party last night.
The good news is that there want be any fawning Businessweek reporters this time. We'll also get to ask 30 minutes of questions without someone trying to sell us a book or tell us what a hard job it is to interview Zuckerberg.
On that note, here come the Q&A:
- (from me) Care to elaborate one what went wrong during yesterday's Keynote? You got a lot of negative press on Techmeme, TechCrunch and from Scoble.
Zuckerberg: We actually had this developer's garage meetup scheduled. Given the fact that one of the biggest knocks on yesterday's session was the fact that people didn't get a chance to ask enough questions, I thought it would help to come by and do some additonal Q&A.
- Why do people spend twice as much time on MySpace as they do on FB?
Zuckerberg: I don't think that's true.
- Will some of the "friends lists" be given out to developers so that they can incorporate some of the new privacy features into the applications that they are creating?
Zuckerberg: Yes, there are API's for friend lists.
- I don't know if I'm unique but I have a different set of behaviors that I like to display to different constituents. Is this addressed by new privacy settings?
Zuckerberg: You can have a friendlist of one. You can also decide who sees what types of activities. Our goal is to allow
- Can you talk about your plans for commerce? Also, can you talk about OpenSocial and whether or not you can committ to all social networks - at least those of size?
Zuckerberg: No, I can't commit to that because I'm not convinced that other social networks may or may not do it right. The best that we can say now -- and that should be demonstrated in our actions -- is that we are philosophically aligned with the concept of data sharing. Right now, we're taking a wait and watch approach. Regarding commerce, we're just creating a commerce platform for developers (yes, this was as much of a non-answer as it sounds like.)
- How are you approaching internationalization? China in particular?
Zuckerberg: We're thinking a lot about how we go into other countries, particularly China. We are trying to decide on whether or not we have servers there and become subject to their laws. It's tricky.
- I have a number of friends that signed up for FB a while ago and they are active on the Web but they are no longer using FB.
Zuckerberg: We've done a poor job incentivizing people with the ecosystem. For instance, if someone adds your application, limiting the number of people they can send the application to will be removed provided they aren't spammy. Otherwise, they will have stricter rules they will need to follow. This might be judged by number of downloads. This should be good for everyone and increase engagement.
- Lena from Hallmark asks if Zuckerberg can talk about roadmap. Can developers get access?
Zuckerberg: Additions to the Beacon program are happening. One of the important issues is data portability.
- Scobleizer asks a question about getting kicked off FB for a day. He got a lot of pushback from his readers about doing this i.e. this was wrong. Scoble asks if Mark would care to comment?
Zuckerberg: This is a really important question but I'm not sure if anyone knows the answer to this question. As I mentioned earlier, we are definitely philisophically aligned with data portability. We need to iron this out, particularly with bigger social networks. In your particular case, you were data scraping which is against our policy.
SIDENOTE: Scoble asks a question about getting re-instated. He's heard that a number of people around the world are getting kicked out. Zuckerberg says that he didn't hear the question. ;)
- There have been accusations of discriminating against groups, in particular Palestinians and Israelis.
Zuckerberg: We've decided to follow the United States regionalization laws so that we can get out of the middle of the politics.
That's a wrap. Definitely a better effort this go around. More open and honest and no annoying, self-promoting, old world media types getting in the way.
Next...
UPDATE 3/12: Brian Solice of PR 2.0 Fame spent several hours with Sarah Lacy after the Zuckerberg keynote. Great perspective of who was really at fault here - check it out here:
http://www.briansolis.com/2008/03/sarah-lacy-on-sarah-lacy-and-sxsw-mark.html
Mon, Mar 10 2008 |
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