The Mark and John Show

Big intro from John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the start of the afternoon, riffing on what was to come over the next few days. Yeah. We can read the programme in the glossy brochure - let’s get started already.

First up: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook.

Okay, so he’s about twelve and a half. And talks like one too, in his cute little Adidas flip-flops, while cleverly deflecting the opening question from John Battelle about how much he was to sell Facebook for.

Mark talked a bit about the social graph – the set of friends and acquaintances everyone has and how Facebook tries to map this so that individuals can showcase themselves and their friends through a series of applications. It’s all about connections, he says, and how we use our social networks to gather information. It’s no longer about huge mainstream media companies disseminating news, it’s about social groupings sharing stuff together.

John asked a question about privacy and security on Facebook. Zuckerberg said that there is an interesting ‘interplay’ between privacy and how much information people want to share. Most folk would rather share stuff, than keep it private, he thinks. A few years ago, people wouldn’t even share their first and last name on the web. Now it’s much less of an issue. And if you modify your privacy settings, you’ll find that there are varying levels of information-sharing, because you won’t automatically be publishing it to 45 million Facebook users, just the ones you choose to within your network(s).

And then, after a series of questions from the floor, did the persisent Mr Battelle not ask the cute Facebook moppet the killer question? Had he considered bringing in a web veteran to help run the company like Sergey Brin and Larry Page did with Eric Schmidt over at Google? Actually, he used the more patronising term 'grown-up'. Mark looked perplexed. ‘Er.. no’, he answered. ‘I think we’ve got a good team, that’s what works for us’. Good answer, Mr Z.