Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg Sounds Off at F8

by Clint Boulton

“I really want to see us build a product that lets you really feel a person and understand what’s going on with them.”

In outlining his opening comments at F8, Zuckerberg implied the need for Facebook—and social networks in general—to be more intelligent. Does this portend a move toward semantic social networks?

“I wish I knew.”

This statement came in response to a question about when we could expect a payment processing platform from Facebook. Many bloggers were hoping to see the platform, which would enable programmers to accept payment by users of their apps. No such platform seems forthcoming, though eWEEK has been assured it is a work in progress.

“Figuring out how we monetize and what exactly the optimal solution is in that is going to be another thing that we work on, but that’s kind of the second priority.”

When asked whether Facebook would charge those who use applications that run on its platform, similar to Salesforce.com’s SAAS (software as a service) business model, Zuckerberg said Facebook’s first priority is growing the user base internationally and improving the way people share data all over the world.

“We’ve thought about a number of different things, but that’s not something that we’ve really figured out. It’s pretty clear that we haven’t figured out exactly the optimal way for us to do this yet.”

This was Zuckerberg’s final response to another question about how Facebook intends to make money from virtual commerce on its site.

“If someone is blatantly ripping us off to the point where they have a JavaScript file that’s called Fakebook … that’s something we want to make sure doesn’t happen.”

This was Zuckerberg’s response to a reporter’s question about what actions Facebook will take against Facebook clones. The question was not from left field: In July Facebook sued German social network StudiVZ for, well, looking too much like Facebook.

“We don’t have anything to announce there today. I think what they’re [OpenSocial Foundation] doing is cool in a lot of ways.”

This statement was Zuckerberg’s answer to a question about whether Facebook would join the OpenSocial Foundation—the group Google, MySpace and Yahoo set up to facilitate data portability across the Web. Several Google members behind OpenSocial attended the event, but, more than a week after it ended, there doesn’t seem to be any union in the works.

“A company that’s building an application inside Facebook today may choose to build it outside Facebook on their own Web site using Facebook Connect tomorrow, and we’re equally happy with that.”

Zuckerberg made this statement to explain how social networks will evolve in the next few years. The stance fosters hope that services such as Facebook’s Connect data-sharing service will open up the traditionally closed network of users.

“There are a lot of mistakes that we’ve made and things that we’ve learned that we need to do differently. I think we can all agree that we don’t want an ecosystem full of applications that are just trying to spread themselves virally and not further our movement.”

This was Zuckerberg’s apology for letting programmers write too many spammy apps when Facebook Platform was launched in May 2007. (People quickly grew tired of invitations to chuck virtual sheep.) Facebook is now offering incentive programs to encourage developers to write better apps.

“It definitely needs to get better. We have some ideas. Sorry—we haven’t gotten anywhere near launching it, so I can’t talk about anything.”

This was Zuckerberg’s brief answer to a question about how Facebook plans to improve its search application. This is an old complaint from users spoiled by the results they get from searching with Google and other top search engines.