This afternoon, Mike Arrington interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at TechCrunch40. (Most of the audience has a Facebook account. Many were on it during the talk.) Arrington started by asking where Facebook's future growth would come from. The answer: outside the USA.
Then the discussion turned to opening up the platform, starting with the mini-feed. Asked if he was afraid that offering the information in one place would reduce page views, Zuckerberg answered that the feature made the site more useful, with the result that page views actually increased by 50%. On the topic of the Social Graph, Zuckerberg said they took the view that the network of relationships already existed outside Facebook and they saw Facebook's goal as modeling it, not creating it.
Arrington asked about the growing pains of launching the API, starting with applications that used "black hat" techniques such as sending unsolicited messages to users. Zuckerberg said their intention was to have a platform that imposed its own rules and allowed a large number of developers rather than have Facebook hand-select the applications. They figure they will be continuing to adjust things, for instance changing the way activity is reported so as to emphasize engagement. Similarly they are looking for other ways to reward engagement rather than merely accumulating users. That's one reason they don't expose a way for applications to leave messages for other users who don't have the app installed.
Zuckerman remarked about how Facebook was one of the first sites to push people to use their first and last names, phone numbers, etc, offering better privacy settings along the way.
What about improving Facebook's messaging facilities? They understand the frustrations and plan to make improvements, but don't see themselves as an email platform. For instance, they are concerned not just about spam but also about preserving the feeling that messages are usually from an individual and not part of a stream of mass-generated messages.
Zuckerman announced that Accel Partners and the Founders Fund have started a $10 million FB Fund which will make grants of $25,000 to $150,000. The fund will not be taking an equity position but will have the right of first refusal on subsequent investments. No web site yet, but send email to [email protected]. The critera: innovative and disruptive things.
In response from a question from the audience about when Facebook would support OpenID and other open standards, Zuckerberg said Facebook only had 300 employees but would be moving it that direction.