Mark Zuckerberg developer Q&A at SXSW
AUSTIN, TX — 4:32 p.m. Central Time: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at Pangaea, a downtown Austin bar. The crowd is standing-room only all the way back. "As if yesterday's interview wasn't enough fun," he wryly notes as he opens the floor for questions. First question is about the Facebook Wall. The developer wants more access to write software that gets and writes posts to Facebook users' profiles. Zuckerberg doesn't answer the question.
4:34 p.m.: Zuckerberg offers a mea culpa for yesterday's interview: "We should have opened it up to questions earlier, and that's why I'm here."
4:35 p.m.: "Why do people spend twice as much time on MySpace as on Facebook?" asks an audience member. "I'm not sure that's true," says Zuckerberg, who then claims Facebook doesn't measure that statistic.
4:37 p.m: Zuckerberg confesses he wasn't able to get his grandparents to join the site until he introduced them to Scrabulous. "I don't talk to them much, but I do play Scrabble," he says. "Props to those guys."
strong>4:39 p.m.: "There are entire categories we didn't anticipate getting popular," says Zuckerberg. "We weren't even thinking about [that] before." He then admits that what he's saying is a "non-answer" to the developer's question about friends lists. Facebook evangelist Dave Morin answers the actual question: "There is an API to friends lists" — software which allows developers to write applications which make use of a Facebook user's friends.
4:42 p.m.: "A lot of the information that's going to be shared, and this is probably the largest category of information on the Web, is information that's shared only with some people," says Zuckerberg. "It's not a solution to all the world's problem, but it will help with efficiency and sharing information."
4:44 p.m.: Zuckerberg addresses Beacon, the controversial ad program. "Beacon is part of the platform," says Zuckerberg — in other words, while the rest of the planet thinks of it as a kind of advertisement, Facebook internally thinks of it as a tool for developers.
4:47 p.m.: On users' privacy, "we're not openly working with governments," says Zuckerberg. "But we have to follow the law. One of the things we're thinking about internally is China. One of the scenarios is that you don't have servers in China, in which case they make your servers slow and make it look like it's not a good service. If you put them in China and the government doesn't like what's on them, they come and arrest the people who administer your servers. It's not a great set of tradeoffs."
4:50 p.m.: Zuckerberg gives a non-answer on the fate of Parakey, the Web-operating system startup Facebook acquired from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. "So you're scrapping the product and just hired the guys, right?" I shout out. Zuckerberg gives another non-answer.
4:51 p.m.: "How has Facebook affected your personal relationships?" asks an audience member. "I did say you could ask about anything, didn't I?" says Zuckerberg.
4:52 p.m.: "We feel like we've aligned people's incentives personally," says Zuckerberg. Developers are rewarded just for getting people to install their app, he explains. That's why Facebook is now adjusting the limits to the number of invitations apps can send. What, no more zombie bites? "If users are finding them spammy, their distribution is going to be dialed way down," says Zuckerberg.
4:54 p.m.: Robert Scoble takes the mike, and confesses his sins personally to Mark Zuckerberg, seeking expiation for the incident which got him banned from Facebook. (He improperly used a program which exported data about his friends from the site.) Zuckerberg says Facebook's trying to figure out what to do about data portability, or making it easier to get data off Facebook.
5:00 p.m.: Last question, about Facebook's involvement in political campaigns. Zuckerberg says he expects other developers will build better applications for political organizing, but the company is going to keep doing what it's doing for now.