Web 2.0 Summit - Mark Zuckerberg
John Battelle is now on stage, interviewing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg…
John - “how’s the financing going?”
Mark - “It’s going well”
John - “Wow, I didn’t expect that response. Don’t you think you’re selling yourself short at $Bn15?”
Mark - “We’ll see.”
Facebook currently employs a little over 300 people. Mark reckons around 700 in a year from now. And most of their recruitment is through referral from current employees…
Social graph - Mark defines it as “the set of connections that everyone has in the world. This has always existed. What we’re doing is taking that social graph and mapping it out. The real connections, not new ones.”
“A lot of people talk about it as Facebook’s social graph. We don’t”
John - “is the social graph the heir to pagerank?… Is it your secret sauce?”
John - “when did you decide to do Platform, and have you been surprised by the rate of adoption?”
Mark - “we actually talked about it before we built Facebook. Adoption has been incredible. It might take thirty years… tens of years… to interoperate with everything we need to… to map out the edges of the social graph.”
John - “are there areas where Facebook might build apps, that we should stay away from?”
“Mark - ”well, there may be something in ads“.
Funny, that… given a conversation at dinner last night…
John - ”what is your view on privacy, and protection…?“
Mark - ”there’s a really interesting interplay between privacy and granular control of information… On the open web, I can either share with everyone or with no one.“ Facebook is more granular than that. A similar argument to those we’ve been using around data licensing… Granular control ”is what makes the system work“.
John - ”but information is on your systems, so it can be subpoena’d“.
Marc Canter - ”We want to have apis to export unique identifiers out of Facebook, so we can make decisions about how to share stuff… You’re 98% open…“
John Battelle - ”so how do we deal with data portability?“
Mark Z - ”It’s the user’s data. We want to get there. That’s definitely the goal state“
Excellent!!! Time to send Mark Zuckerberg the Open Data Commons license, clearly…
John Battelle - asks a final question, about the trend (Google, Yahoo!, etc) to appoint an experienced CEO to grow the company. Mark seems a little evasive, but suggests there isn’t a need to bring in a new figurehead, so much as to build a strong team.
Technorati Tags: Facebook, open data, open data commons, Talis, Web 2.0, web2summit
