Mark Zuckerberg: I helped a pretty penny to open source rival Facebook
One would expect that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would simply ignore four students at New York University who would like to challenge Facebook’s dominance on social networks by creating a distributed, free alternative with the ability to run people on their own servers.
But instead, Zuckerberg declares that he donated to the Diaspora project, adding his money to the already collected $ 190 thousand, because he appreciates their desire to change society ( Editor's note: the press service of Facebook decided to keep silent about the donated Zuckerberg amount ).
In an interview with Wired.com, on Wednesday after the announcement of simplified privacy controls on Facebook, Zuckerberg also spoke about his vision for the site in the future, his desire to make society more open, why the Facebook profile is so important and why he wouldn’t launch a social network be it today.
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Wired.com : What do you think about pushing through an open, federal social network through the efforts of four students at New York University who collected $ 200,000 for a Diaspora project without a single line of code?
Zuckerberg : I donated money to them. I think this is a great idea.
Actually, this reminds me of the thing called Wirehog , which we did at an early stage. It soon became clear that users wanted more photos on the site. There were a number of users who changed their profile images every day. And watching this data, we realized that people want to share photos.
But the photos are expensive and we did not have the infrastructure. We just tried to expand the site and added more universities to the site. So we made a local web server so that people could install it on their computers, and be able to upload all their files — mostly photos, but music videos — were supported to share them with friends. So to some extent it was a prototype of a platform, but with a decentralized information exchange system.
In general, I think this is a cool idea, just based on the above.
I think these are cool dudes, just trying to do that. In them I notice myself a little. Of course, it is their approach that society can be more open, and the words "We must try to do it."
( Editor's note: Wirehog was destroyed by Facebook after arguing ex-Facebook president Sin Parker (who was the co-founder of Napster) that Wirehog could die a lawsuit due to which the infamous p2p music sharing service did not happen to us ).
Interesting, but a lot of confidential things are much easier to keep in a centralized system. Some simple things like “friend-friend” viewing, peering things — everything is done simply, but when you get into “friends of friends”, you will begin to dig in a heap of problems, so it was with Wirehog. If someone comes up with a new approach, it will be damn cool.
Wired.com : If you decided to compete with Facebook from scratch, what would you do?
Zuckerberg : The thing that really excites me is the fulfillment of the mission of creating an open society.
Often I start a thought experiment: if I were not on Facebook, how would I try to make society more open? Just when I started doing a social network 6 years ago, it was the best idea of all. Now, at this time, I'm not sure that creating a social network is the best idea. Now we are, and there is a great opportunity to do something on top of our platform. Now there are awesome new technologies like EC2 and S3, which then did not exist ( Editor's note: Zuckerberg shows cloud storage and computing services from Amazon ).
And if I started again, it would be fantastic. This is a good thought experiment, because if we, as a company, are not working now on the most important things that will make society more open in three-five years, we have to do these things. I think that the sites around mobile phones are now the most attractive.
Wired.com : How do you think the backlash over the past few weeks corresponds to the size of Facebook, and do you start to feel like a company comparable to Google, where people cannot always understand exactly what annoys them?
Zuckerberg : I don't know, it's hard to say. On Facebook, of course, there are a lot of communities that we currently serve. I think the feedback of people was quite reasonable. Privacy settings were complicated. We had to make them simple.
But I don’t know, one thing personally depresses me ... I’m upset because people say, "You need to do this to cut the loot." The gate because it is not at all like the spirit of our company. It is so unlikely that we think about it all, that we feel misunderstood.
Wired.com : Because now there are ways to make much more money?
Zuckerberg : In-in! I think that there is. There are very simple ways that we could use. First, our users do not choke in the stream of advertising. You see how much space on our pages is allotted to advertising, comparing with search queries. The average advertising value on the pages is a little less than 10 percent, and the average value in search queries is about 20 percent. In this case, advertising may be relevant because it matches your request. But it is obvious that you can earn more money by giving advertising more space.
This is the most elementary thing we could do. But we don't want that. We make enough money. Exactly, exactly, I am talking about the fact that everything works so well in our country, and we grow in the way we want it.
Wired.com : Do you want Facebook to become online?
Zuckerberg : I think there is something fundamental in the use of products that are centered around people, as opposed to products centered around information that does not concern people. We fully observe this in all tests. We did all sorts of such tests with observing eye movements and we see that when people open Facebook, they don’t pay attention to the navigation links. They look at people's faces and move around the site, clicking on images of people's faces.
I think people just instinctively, so to speak, “at the hardware level,” process the faces of other people and understand the semantic content and expressions at a more detailed level than in other types of communications. Therefore, I believe that there is something in it, and this something will find its application in all applications, be it a web application or any of the mobile applications. Although I do not think that we will do all this, however, I hope that we can help with this.
Wired.com : Instant Personalization - is that something you really want to expand? Is it because the system is made according to the opt-in scheme instead of opt-out? ( Editor's note: Instant Personalization is a new program that Facebook sends information to its users on sites like Yelp and Pandora, when a Facebook user logs in to the site. Facebook connected all its users to this system, but due to a wave of users indignation , made a simplified unsubscribe scheme from the system .)
Zuckerberg : Well, we have a version of Instant Personalization, which is opt-in - in general, it's just Connect (editor's note: This is a system that allows users to log in on different sites using their Facebook account). And most people, most developers, use this thing.
We believe that these interfaces can be personalized as soon as you start using them - this is a very powerful thing. So we took two approaches, we have social plugins - and now there are 100 thousand sites that use them. The idea is that we make plugins so simple that site owners need to add just one line of code to add social functionality. This is a very interesting experience in the absence of problems with personal data - we do not share any information with these sites, so there’s absolutely no need to worry about your data. Now we think that you can roll out this feature very widely.
Instant Personalization is more of a test project. What can a company do if it can really customize things for themselves? If we owned Pandora, for example (no, we are not trying to get hold of it), then I don’t think that someone would have a hard time with us getting their own experience, since we are part of the same company.
We said, "Let's try to work closely with them and achieve the interaction of our product with their engineering teams, our lawyers will work together to write the perfect contract and privacy policy as if we were one company." In the future, more applications would become more social, and this is a big part of what we want to do. Instant personalization is a cool thing, but it's only a small fraction of what we work on.
Wired.com : You are moving away from the current Facebook, where people share photos and keep in touch with friends to the site where people characterize themselves on the Web. Is the company going to go this way?
Zuckerberg : We did not think in terms of such terms. When people think about individuality in the past, they seriously think about filling out all the information in a profile. I understand why people think so, but our opinion is that society is more interconnected.
In fact, you are defined by people whom you know - not only your acquaintances, but also those with whom you spend time, whom you love and with whom you work. I believe that you show your friends in your profile, but this information is different from the information you wrote in your profile. In a way, we receive and display what is most important to you, and this is a big detail, because of which we can independently make these services and this platform, which allows other people to create their own truly excellent services. But, of course, the most important thing about people is those they care about.
Wired.com : Do you see danger in the huge growth of Facebook?
Zuckerberg : I think it will be bad if we try to do everything on our own - I'm not sure that this is within the power of one company. Therefore, we have this platform creation strategy. This will be the most effective way to make the changes we hope to bring.
We just could not do all these things, despite the fact that we have a lot of amazingly intelligent people. Nobody is omnipotent.
I do not think that society will develop in such a way that only one big website will remain. It seems to me that it will turn out that there will be a lot of great services and we will help this to happen. Yes, people are always a bit skeptical about something fast-growing, but they just need to look at what is being done.
I think people have good questions about what we do, but they should also ask the same questions about other types of models. Our model is based on control. You (or your friends) fill out the profile with anything, but you get complete control over what remains there. This model is very far from the one that works in search engines, where you can look after yourself, but you have no control over what is.
How our advertising works: we show you ads that, in our opinion, are relevant to what you yourself told us, while many other ad networks will show you ads based on full tracking of what you have seen all over the Internet. Therefore, I believe that feedback from people is usually fair, if based on facts. We only believe that we are part of this important trend and we want to promote it with all our might, but at the same time, in my opinion, it is important to pay attention to the entire ecosystem.
Wired.com : So what about turning profile links into links to Facebook interest pages? If someone notes that he “likes” Wired.com, he does not assume that he marks the “liked” page-branch of Wired.com on Facebook - he is just interested in Wired.com itself.
Zuckerberg : This is a whole open graph, you can put a “Like” plugin on Wired.com and mark Wired.com “like”. This plugin makes these non-Facebook pages part of Open Graph.
It is interesting. We first talked about decentralization. We are trying to promote it in this direction and develop as long as it makes sense. For example, my favorite group, Green Day, has a Facebook page, but they also have their own website, GreenDay.com. So why is someone forced to be listed on the fans page on Facebook. We want to make it so that when you connect to it, it would appear in your graph, in your favorite music, and so that anyone who clicks on it would go to GreenDay.com, and you would receive updates from the stream of the site. In short, there are a lot of things that we launched on f8. So, if I’m looking for Green Day, I’ll get the items that are most connected, and if in the case of Green Day it’s their website GreenDay.com, I’ll get a link to GreenDay.com.
This becomes especially interesting with sites like Yelp and CitySearch. Again, it seems to be better if we do not try to do everything on our own. Yelp has a much better service than ours, and we are happy to provide links to it.
Photo: Associated Press / Marcio José Sanchez
But instead, Zuckerberg declares that he donated to the Diaspora project, adding his money to the already collected $ 190 thousand, because he appreciates their desire to change society ( Editor's note: the press service of Facebook decided to keep silent about the donated Zuckerberg amount ).
In an interview with Wired.com, on Wednesday after the announcement of simplified privacy controls on Facebook, Zuckerberg also spoke about his vision for the site in the future, his desire to make society more open, why the Facebook profile is so important and why he wouldn’t launch a social network be it today.
')
Wired.com : What do you think about pushing through an open, federal social network through the efforts of four students at New York University who collected $ 200,000 for a Diaspora project without a single line of code?
Zuckerberg : I donated money to them. I think this is a great idea.
Actually, this reminds me of the thing called Wirehog , which we did at an early stage. It soon became clear that users wanted more photos on the site. There were a number of users who changed their profile images every day. And watching this data, we realized that people want to share photos.
But the photos are expensive and we did not have the infrastructure. We just tried to expand the site and added more universities to the site. So we made a local web server so that people could install it on their computers, and be able to upload all their files — mostly photos, but music videos — were supported to share them with friends. So to some extent it was a prototype of a platform, but with a decentralized information exchange system.
In general, I think this is a cool idea, just based on the above.
I think these are cool dudes, just trying to do that. In them I notice myself a little. Of course, it is their approach that society can be more open, and the words "We must try to do it."
( Editor's note: Wirehog was destroyed by Facebook after arguing ex-Facebook president Sin Parker (who was the co-founder of Napster) that Wirehog could die a lawsuit due to which the infamous p2p music sharing service did not happen to us ).
Interesting, but a lot of confidential things are much easier to keep in a centralized system. Some simple things like “friend-friend” viewing, peering things — everything is done simply, but when you get into “friends of friends”, you will begin to dig in a heap of problems, so it was with Wirehog. If someone comes up with a new approach, it will be damn cool.
Wired.com : If you decided to compete with Facebook from scratch, what would you do?
Zuckerberg : The thing that really excites me is the fulfillment of the mission of creating an open society.
Often I start a thought experiment: if I were not on Facebook, how would I try to make society more open? Just when I started doing a social network 6 years ago, it was the best idea of all. Now, at this time, I'm not sure that creating a social network is the best idea. Now we are, and there is a great opportunity to do something on top of our platform. Now there are awesome new technologies like EC2 and S3, which then did not exist ( Editor's note: Zuckerberg shows cloud storage and computing services from Amazon ).
And if I started again, it would be fantastic. This is a good thought experiment, because if we, as a company, are not working now on the most important things that will make society more open in three-five years, we have to do these things. I think that the sites around mobile phones are now the most attractive.
Wired.com : How do you think the backlash over the past few weeks corresponds to the size of Facebook, and do you start to feel like a company comparable to Google, where people cannot always understand exactly what annoys them?
Zuckerberg : I don't know, it's hard to say. On Facebook, of course, there are a lot of communities that we currently serve. I think the feedback of people was quite reasonable. Privacy settings were complicated. We had to make them simple.
But I don’t know, one thing personally depresses me ... I’m upset because people say, "You need to do this to cut the loot." The gate because it is not at all like the spirit of our company. It is so unlikely that we think about it all, that we feel misunderstood.
Wired.com : Because now there are ways to make much more money?
Zuckerberg : In-in! I think that there is. There are very simple ways that we could use. First, our users do not choke in the stream of advertising. You see how much space on our pages is allotted to advertising, comparing with search queries. The average advertising value on the pages is a little less than 10 percent, and the average value in search queries is about 20 percent. In this case, advertising may be relevant because it matches your request. But it is obvious that you can earn more money by giving advertising more space.
This is the most elementary thing we could do. But we don't want that. We make enough money. Exactly, exactly, I am talking about the fact that everything works so well in our country, and we grow in the way we want it.
Wired.com : Do you want Facebook to become online?
Zuckerberg : I think there is something fundamental in the use of products that are centered around people, as opposed to products centered around information that does not concern people. We fully observe this in all tests. We did all sorts of such tests with observing eye movements and we see that when people open Facebook, they don’t pay attention to the navigation links. They look at people's faces and move around the site, clicking on images of people's faces.
I think people just instinctively, so to speak, “at the hardware level,” process the faces of other people and understand the semantic content and expressions at a more detailed level than in other types of communications. Therefore, I believe that there is something in it, and this something will find its application in all applications, be it a web application or any of the mobile applications. Although I do not think that we will do all this, however, I hope that we can help with this.
Wired.com : Instant Personalization - is that something you really want to expand? Is it because the system is made according to the opt-in scheme instead of opt-out? ( Editor's note: Instant Personalization is a new program that Facebook sends information to its users on sites like Yelp and Pandora, when a Facebook user logs in to the site. Facebook connected all its users to this system, but due to a wave of users indignation , made a simplified unsubscribe scheme from the system .)
Zuckerberg : Well, we have a version of Instant Personalization, which is opt-in - in general, it's just Connect (editor's note: This is a system that allows users to log in on different sites using their Facebook account). And most people, most developers, use this thing.
We believe that these interfaces can be personalized as soon as you start using them - this is a very powerful thing. So we took two approaches, we have social plugins - and now there are 100 thousand sites that use them. The idea is that we make plugins so simple that site owners need to add just one line of code to add social functionality. This is a very interesting experience in the absence of problems with personal data - we do not share any information with these sites, so there’s absolutely no need to worry about your data. Now we think that you can roll out this feature very widely.
Instant Personalization is more of a test project. What can a company do if it can really customize things for themselves? If we owned Pandora, for example (no, we are not trying to get hold of it), then I don’t think that someone would have a hard time with us getting their own experience, since we are part of the same company.
We said, "Let's try to work closely with them and achieve the interaction of our product with their engineering teams, our lawyers will work together to write the perfect contract and privacy policy as if we were one company." In the future, more applications would become more social, and this is a big part of what we want to do. Instant personalization is a cool thing, but it's only a small fraction of what we work on.
Wired.com : You are moving away from the current Facebook, where people share photos and keep in touch with friends to the site where people characterize themselves on the Web. Is the company going to go this way?
Zuckerberg : We did not think in terms of such terms. When people think about individuality in the past, they seriously think about filling out all the information in a profile. I understand why people think so, but our opinion is that society is more interconnected.
In fact, you are defined by people whom you know - not only your acquaintances, but also those with whom you spend time, whom you love and with whom you work. I believe that you show your friends in your profile, but this information is different from the information you wrote in your profile. In a way, we receive and display what is most important to you, and this is a big detail, because of which we can independently make these services and this platform, which allows other people to create their own truly excellent services. But, of course, the most important thing about people is those they care about.
Wired.com : Do you see danger in the huge growth of Facebook?
Zuckerberg : I think it will be bad if we try to do everything on our own - I'm not sure that this is within the power of one company. Therefore, we have this platform creation strategy. This will be the most effective way to make the changes we hope to bring.
We just could not do all these things, despite the fact that we have a lot of amazingly intelligent people. Nobody is omnipotent.
I do not think that society will develop in such a way that only one big website will remain. It seems to me that it will turn out that there will be a lot of great services and we will help this to happen. Yes, people are always a bit skeptical about something fast-growing, but they just need to look at what is being done.
I think people have good questions about what we do, but they should also ask the same questions about other types of models. Our model is based on control. You (or your friends) fill out the profile with anything, but you get complete control over what remains there. This model is very far from the one that works in search engines, where you can look after yourself, but you have no control over what is.
How our advertising works: we show you ads that, in our opinion, are relevant to what you yourself told us, while many other ad networks will show you ads based on full tracking of what you have seen all over the Internet. Therefore, I believe that feedback from people is usually fair, if based on facts. We only believe that we are part of this important trend and we want to promote it with all our might, but at the same time, in my opinion, it is important to pay attention to the entire ecosystem.
Wired.com : So what about turning profile links into links to Facebook interest pages? If someone notes that he “likes” Wired.com, he does not assume that he marks the “liked” page-branch of Wired.com on Facebook - he is just interested in Wired.com itself.
Zuckerberg : This is a whole open graph, you can put a “Like” plugin on Wired.com and mark Wired.com “like”. This plugin makes these non-Facebook pages part of Open Graph.
It is interesting. We first talked about decentralization. We are trying to promote it in this direction and develop as long as it makes sense. For example, my favorite group, Green Day, has a Facebook page, but they also have their own website, GreenDay.com. So why is someone forced to be listed on the fans page on Facebook. We want to make it so that when you connect to it, it would appear in your graph, in your favorite music, and so that anyone who clicks on it would go to GreenDay.com, and you would receive updates from the stream of the site. In short, there are a lot of things that we launched on f8. So, if I’m looking for Green Day, I’ll get the items that are most connected, and if in the case of Green Day it’s their website GreenDay.com, I’ll get a link to GreenDay.com.
This becomes especially interesting with sites like Yelp and CitySearch. Again, it seems to be better if we do not try to do everything on our own. Yelp has a much better service than ours, and we are happy to provide links to it.
Photo: Associated Press / Marcio José Sanchez
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/94937/
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