Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is interviewed by Sarah Lacy from Business Week.
A question was about how Facebook was playing out in a real world scenario. They mentioned using Facebook to organize a revolt in Columbia. Zuckerberg also mentioned how people in other countries use Facebook to keep in touch with people all around the world.
Are there things you do to help people? Not really, except that to help people communicate. Sarah told tales about Mark when she first interviewed him that got a laugh over his inexperience. Back to helping people. He says they are trying to built the infrastructure to help people solve problems.
Facebook has launched in Spain, Germany and France will launch tonight.
He thinks there will be some platform in the future, whether it’s Facebook or something like it, that will connect all the people everywhere. They talked about the type of organic advertising that he wants to see on Facebook. Where the things people naturally want to talk about become a revenue stream for ads. Mark did say they may have gotten started on the way they are doing this a little bit wrong. He said Beacom was intended to be part of the platform, not the part of advertising. Beacon was supposed to let people take action in other parts of the web and share that on Facebook. He views it as an important trend, but he thinks they communicated it incorrectly.
Regarding Newsfeed, Sarah said that both Beacon and Newsfeed brought up issues of privacy. Mark commented that people need to be able to decide who to share things with. So Beacon and Newsfeed are meant to offer granular control over who sees what on the site. He said Facebook needs to give people more control.
He repeated a number of times that the company wasn’t thinking about making money per se. They were focused on building a platform that helps people communicate in a whole new way. He insists that this is what the company is all about.
The audience reacted negatively to a number of things Sarah did and applauded a couple of times when they felt they had put her down. I don’t know if this is some old animosity or they just didn’t like her style of asking questions of their hero Zuckerberg. She finally gave up the mike to questioning by the audience. Wild. Seems there had been a lot a Twittering about how she was doing before the audience revolted aloud.
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