Web2Summit: Mark Zuckerberg keeps it close to the vest

The first guest at the fourth annual Web 2.0 Summit, after the opening remarks from Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, was Facebook top dog Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that his company had just bought the state of California in an all-stock deal.

Well, that didn't exactly happen, but the purchase of one of the 50 states is perhaps the only rumor about Facebook that hasn't been floated in recent weeks. Large companies are jostling for an opportunity to buy, at an exorbitant price, only a small part of Facebook. And at the center of this all is young Zuckerberg, who looked on the stage like a devilish teenager who doesn't want to tell you where he hid the car keys. While being interviewed by John Battelle, he looked more like John's son than the entrepreneur of the moment, getting pleasure from frustrating Battelle's sundry probings (although I doubt most teenagers have gone through the rigorous media training that Zuckerberg appears to have) without betraying much emotion.

Battelle said he found the terms of service for Facebook Application developers "terrifying." Zuckerberg deflected the questions with some reassuring lines, referring to "the trust we have with the community" and "anyone can develop anything without having to talk to us." On one hand, he said that the terms of service give Facebook "the flexibility to do what we need to do as this platform grows" but suggested that the terms of service "are not as egregious as language makes it sound....We reserve the right to build anything and compete with anything, but we'll do it on equal ground."

Zuckerberg answered questions, some friendly, some leading, some almost confrontational, with poise and aplomb, but didn't say much and revealed nothing. It was a short, news-free appearance: a star turn, nothing more. Or, pardon the metaphor, it was like a Facebook page in which someone doesn't really say anything about himself.

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