Web2Summit: Backstage with Mark Zuckerberg

A lot of people will be reporting on what Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has to say in his onstage interview with John Battelle here at the Web 2.0 Summit. I thought I'd share a few notes from by backstage conversation with Mark before I went on stage for the summit opener.

Here's the money quote (or rather paraphrase, since this is from memory):

We really need to move the thinking about the social graph. This exists out in the world, and has always existed. We didn't invent it. How can we "own" it? We're just trying to map it out. We have a model of the social graph that we're constructing.

Hmmm.... turns out Mark is saying much the same thing onstage. But it's great to know that Mark really believes this, that it's the heart of the company's DNA. (I do think that there are two views of the social graph, though, and how it gets deployed: there's a platform view in which it can be exploited to build smarter applications on Facebook; there's a deeper view in which the Facebook-discovered social graph can be accessed by other applications elsewhere on the net. Facebook's granular control of what information you reveal and to whom is thus a key part of the platform -- but the question is how far Facebook will go in letting other sites use this information. If Mark's answer is the first, Facebook is ultimately a closed platform; if the latter, it becomes a true open platform and value enabler.)

By contrast, a conversation with Chris DeWolfe of MySpace earlier in the day made clear that MySpace primarily thinks of itself as a media company. Chris bristled at the term "social graph," carefully substituting "friends list." His conversation focuses on the idea that MySpace is building a platform for people to manage their personal online presence. He points out quite correctly that MySpace has long been open to third party widgets -- all it's missing is the APIs. But I think there's more than that.

It seems to me that Facebook really is thinking much more broadly about the future of the net, and seeing their platform as a kind of exploration of its potential. Onstage, Mark remarks that what they're doing might take tens of years before it's finished. He also explicitly says that he doesn't see Facebook as a media company.

By contrast, he points out that Facebook is a deeply technical company. Computing the news feed to find the most relevant news from a social network is a really hard problem. He revels in that idea.

I'm really impressed.

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