Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook’s young founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the keynote on Sunday. Started as a college networking tool, the site (valued at $15 billion!) is now used by over 60 million users of all ages, with over 50% using the site every day. With the new Facebook Platform, the site is transforming into a new entity, one in which third-party developers will create a torrent of applications and utilities to serve their own communities and advance their own agendas (such as the Brooklyn Museum's app that lets patrons showcase its art collection on their pages). Facebook's goal is to support super-efficient communication and connection, with semi-public/semi-private information that members post in trust; key in the strategy churn now is how best to monetize it, particularly when their 3-year contract with Microsoft expires.
Zuckerberg admitted that having a single threshold for spam-flagging apps actually worsens the overall experience of “spamminess”, as everyone races to the limit allowed. The critical challenge for the Facebook Platform is how to balance the competing needs for easiness, safety, and personal information control. Numerous complaints came from the floor about the current inadequacies of searching, tagging, and information shielding.
My sense of the Facebook discussion is that the platform – rather than driving the users – is barely keeping up with the demands being put upon it. Users know only too well what shortcuts they want in personal networking, based on years of making do with disconnected software and datasources, of keeping their networks up to date with their photos, news, and information. Now that the tools are matured sufficiently to make virtual networking possible, the pent-up demand of the extroverted majority is driving change to a blur. If not Facebook, it will be something like it, I'm convinced. Pandora's box is opened.
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