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I just got back from the Pangaea Lounge in Austin, where Facebook is hosting their "developer garage" party. The event was originally intended to be a series of presentations over food and
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booze about the Facebook platform and applications, but all of that changed after yesterday's disastrous keynote with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The audience was furious at the interviewer's flirtatious presentation and constant interruption of Zuckerberg, and it's caused quite a storm over the last 24 hours.
So earlier today, Facebook announced that Zuckerberg would participate in the developer garage and take questions on any topic from the audience. I went over there around 3pm and stood in the rain with scores of other people, until we got inside, where we were greeted by an open bar and a nice appetizer spread. For the first hour there was a series of presentations, but quite a number of people in the room were there solely for Zuckerberg.
When he came on stage around 4:30pm local time, he was relaxed and in a good mood. Without an interviewer managing him, he seem much more at ease with himself, fielding a variety of questions from the audience. For example, when asked about sharing user data with the government, he explained that Facebook is still committed to privacy but must also comply with applicable laws. In the case of China, one thing they're considering is not maintaining servers there, which would protect them from having to either reveal private user info on demand of the Chinese government or break local law by not doing so.
Another audience member asked Zuck about whether he would commit to working with any social network of more than 25 million members regarding data portability. Zuckerberg refused on the grounds of privacy. He explained that while he embraced openness philosophically, you can't always know the motivations behind other companies, and did not want to expose Facebook users to additional spam, etc. He also noted they plan to change the way apps developers can allow users to send out messages to others. Rather than imposing an artificial limit like 20 users at a time, the limit would be based on how the FB user community trusted the app. If it was well trusted, users would be able to send to larger numbers of people. If it's a spam trap, they would clamp down on it and impose harsher limits.
I still don't think he adequately addressed yesterday's keynote, though. He fielded just one question on the topic, and said that the problem was that the audience was frustrated with the fact that they couldn't ask questions until the very end. That may be true, but he audience was frustrated by the tenor of the interview from the very beginning. But I suppose it wouldn't have been good form for Zuck to say that the interviewer did a poor job, right? -andy
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