Facebook CEO & COO Speak!
Published by Rodney Rumford May 30th, 2008 in Facebook, Facebook News.Facebook CEO & COO Speak! I was recently at the All Things D conference in Carlsbad. This event is a who’s who of CEO’s from Jerry Yang to Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg. I had the good fortune of running in Mark Zuckerberg at the end of the evening and we had a brief chat about facebook.
Much has been written about Mark. Let me share my thoughts. He is a quiet guy, but feels very genuine to me. I read body language quite well and he is open and outgoing if you observe him. Painfully shy people do not initiate body contact (ie. hand on shoulder, etc.), which Mark does. I like his vision and the team he is assembling. He is positioning facebook for growth, monetization, technology innovation and leadership. The success of the facebook F8 platform is unrivaled in the tech space from an adoption perspective.
The main message from the stage: Facebook is all about sharing and helping people share information more efficiently. This can mean a lot of things and will manifest in ways that most people are not even thinking about.
I have decided to share video highlights of Sheryl Sandberg & Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with Kara Swisher from All Things D Conference. This is an amazing conference and you should attend if you ever get the opportunity. They talked about everything from the value of a poke, (there is value in a poke? Oh most definitely there is) to social games to ways to share information.
A few highlights from the All Things D Blog:
* What about the monetization issue? What about advertising? Sandberg begins talking about demand fulfillment. Notes that Facebook has an extraordinary amount of information about its users and can work with advertisers to create real user engagement. She describes a free-cone promotion Facebook held with Ben and Jerry’s that was so successful that it generated some 53 million page views on Ben and Jerry’s Web site and forced the company to give away 250,000 more cones than it had planned.
* Noting the generally juvenile nature of Facebook apps, Kara wonders if such applications have to become useful at some point. Zuckerberg answers that utility and usefulness don’t have to be a huge application. There’s a trend toward smaller, useful applications that aren’t Microsoft Word, he says, but still address a need.
* What sort of company are you? Zuckerberg: We’re not a media company. We’re a technology company. Kara asks: What is a technology company? Zuckerberg replies that it’s a company that creates technology.
* Noting the generally juvenile nature of Facebook apps, Kara wonders if such applications have to become useful at some point. Zuckerberg answers that utility and usefulness don’t have to be a huge application. There’s a trend toward smaller, useful applications that aren’t Microsoft Word, he says, but still address a need.
Part 1
Part 2
You can read more at Wired, and a great article from Dan Farber of CNET.
Technorati Tags: facebook, all things D
Great post. I’ve been trying to catch up on the conference and what was said. It seems like it’s an important time for Fb and for the development world. Applications seems like a dying giant, there are a lot of application on there that simply don’t provide any value. I work for a company that manage and tracks gift cards, and for a long time we were debating whether or not it was worth spending the time and resource on developing a facebook application (gift card md) that could actually provide value as well as a function. I believe we hit the holy grail. Instead of all the fake gifts, users can actually regift and trade gift cards within the fb environment and within our community. It will be exciting to see what happens. Things are slowly opening up, and I believe there is going to influx of awesome applications, that can utilize the fb platform.
Facebook is truly the great generation of technology! Hopefully the platform will continue to improve the technology and social networking abilities - while leaving advertising and monetization to pros like Appssavvy and Lookery. They work in the best interest of applications, while Facebook should continue to work on behalf of its users.