Zuckerberg discusses Facebook’s future in NY Times interview

     

In a recent interview with The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo Facebook CEOMark Zuckerberg discussed the company’s recent acquisitions and their relationship to the Facebook brand, their efforts to improve its product offerings, and his feelings about privacy and anonymity.

The conversation began with Manjoo asking questions about Facebook’s Creative Labs division, and what users can expect from the company’s new products. Zuckerberg said that the Lab’s purpose is not only “unbundling [Facebook's] big blue app” but also creating new and innovative products. When Manjoo implied in a question that two of Facebook’s recent creations — its “Home” app and Graph Search capability — don’t work, Zuckerberg said the apps need more time to really develop.

Graph search, for instance, isn’t even a finished product yet, he said. Facebook is still working on implementing a post-search feature — something that is bound to inspire concerns about privacy once it goes into effect — for both its website and mobile app.

Zuckerberg added that “Home” and “Paper” likely won’t “move the needle” for a long time because Facebook’s overall usage is so large. The response in terms of usage for Facebook’s “Home” app was “much slower than we expected,” but that it was “a riskier thing” than some of Facebook’s other new apps.

Later in the interview, Manjoo asked Zuckerberg how he feels about Snapchat’s premium on privacy, and other apps that focus on anonymity.

“Anonymity is different. I’m not going to say it can’t work, because I think that’s too extreme. But I think that these interactions are better rooted in some sense of building relationships,” Zuckerberg said.

“So anonymity is not the first thing that we’ll go do,” he added later.

The conversation eventually moved from a discussion of Facebook’s plans for its native products to a discussion about the company’s recent acquisitions, and how these products would fit into the scope of Facebook’s brand.

The messaging space is “bigger than we initially realized,” Zuckerberg told Manjoo, after the reporter asked why the company didn’t just invent its own WhatsAppdoppelganger. He continued with an explanation of the nuances of how WhatsApp is used versus how Facebook messenger is used. WhatsApp is used primarily as a replacement for SMS service, while Facebook’s own messenger is primarily used for casual communication between friends — so the two products can easily exist in harmony.

Then the conversation shifted — as it was inevitably bound to do — to questions about Zuckerberg’s plans for the company’s future. Manjoo asked Zuckerberg if being older than the average Facebook user means that it become more difficult to understand what users are looking for in the company’s products. Zuckerberg rejected the question’s premise, saying that he was never in the same age demographic as the company’s user base.

But while the company uses “rigorous quantitative and qualitative feedback” to parse the behaviors of its users, Zuckerberg said his primary goal for Facebook’s future has nothing to do with anything the company is currently known for. His ambitions, he said, are much loftier: Expanding access to the Web.

“I’m focused on Internet.org and how to connect all these people,” Zuckerberg said.

The company, Zuckerberg explained, has a policy of sending Facebook’s product managers to emerging-market countries to see firsthand what it’s like for people who are just accessing the Internet for the first time.

“They learn the most interesting things,” Zuckerberg said of his project managers. “People ask questions like, ‘It says here I’m supposed to put in my password — what’s a password’ For us, that’s a mind-boggling thing.”