The Modern Journalist

SXSW Keynote: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder

Sunday’s keynote address by Mark Zuckerberg kicks off in about 30 minutes. I’ll be live-blogging the talk as I did yesterday with Henry Jenkins.

Zuckerberg founded Facebook, along with three other computer science students at Harvard, in February 2004. The service was rolled out from university to university during its initial launch. He currently serves as the company’s CEO. Forbes estimates his worth on paper to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion.

Notes from the talk…

• The idea of the company, Zuckerberg says, is to allow people to connect much more easily and tap into the Network Effect to create a boiling point of “whatever”.
• Zuckerberg talks about the launch in Columbia - people using Facebook to revolt against the government; this is something that Howard Rheingold first discussed with mobile networks in his book Smart Mobs. I’m not sure that either Sarah Lacey Lacy or Zuckerberg realize this.
• If Zuckerberg’s assertion is right about Columbia, there is nothing in Google News search that backs that assertion.
• I’m unclear why discussion Social Networks can’t simply be: its’ a way to easily connect, we don’t know what else is going to happen. We offer tools. Trying to make this more important than simply that feels very conflated.
• Sarah Lacey Lacy is conducting a horrible interview. There is really no focus.
• Jason Pontin correctly points out that Zuckerberg claims terrorism comes from a lack of communication, and that Facebook can fix such an inequity. My experience with Facebook is simply a way to keep up with friends.
• Facebook is running at a break-even financial structure as they build out the communication platform
• Zuckerberg says that people thought that Facebook was only a college network, which only makes sense since they launched first across 30 university networks.
• The general consensus in the social media sphere is that Lacey Lacy is ruining this discussion by injecting herself — and cutting Zuckerberg off numerous times.
• Zuckerberg’s assertion is that the future of their advertising will be users opting-in what information they want to share, and that will lead to more focused advertising.
• Zuckerberg believes the banner ad is dead (he is correct in that assertion), but admits they haven’t figured out what comes next, which is bad for the company’s long-term future.
• “At Facebook, we believe fundamentally that people are good.”; the company is set up to actively encourage development on the platform; and that makes people opt-in and add stuff, while walking the line of self-moderating communities.
• They are looking to set up a Slashdo-type moderation system. Karma will be used to incentivize participation.
• Zuckerberg said the company has no plans to go public because those types of finances attract the wrong type of people (from the Twitter-verse)