One of the things I ask everyday is how can I get this company to move quickly. Technology companies tend to get "slower" as they grow to larger scale... Try and fail. You don't need to get everything right. "Move fast, be bold and take risks" is what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries to hammer home everyday. Zuckerberg sat down with Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing and answered frank questions. Battelle asked, "do you feel the pressure of power," that some people don't trust you? A series of news-making revelations about Mark Zuckerberg's strategies for feature development broke at this Web 2.0 talk.
Zuckerberg argued that the future of messaging is going to seamlessly integrate email, instant messaging and updates. Facebook plans to facilitate small-group communication and create rich inoperable social data sets. However, data portability and openness are sometimes at odds with strict user controls. Together Zuckerberg, Battelle and O'Reilly debated the delicate issues raised by privacy rights, and in mediating the gray areas that determine what mutual rights Facebook friends have to each other's data.
John Battelle asked if Zuckerberg was willing to take his business model off-domain, and start a social-graph driven ad network, not unlike Google's Adsense. O'Reilly asked if Zuckerberg was going to employ a robust partnering strategy. Instead of building things ourselves, Zuckerberg explained, Facebook is going to build platforms and stress interoperability to offer access to it's 500 million users. He claims that "our default is to build an open platform." Groups, location and messages are Facebook's foundational building blocks of the social graph. Zuckerberg asks: Why not empower a really good entrepreneur to go out and build their own company? "We think it will blow everything else out of the water."
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2010. Making a bold move to philanthropy, he recently donated a hundred million dollars to improve the strapped Newark, New Jersey, school system. In Bloomberg Game Changers, Zuckerberg was described as "more than a little bit of a rebel. He's a modern James Dean, this guy." John Battelle suggested that Zuckerberg's style is full-speed-ahead, "not to ask for permission, to ask for forgiveness."
O'Reilly Media reports that "Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families and coworkers. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Mark attended Harvard University and studied computer science before moving the company to Palo Alto, California."
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