Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication

As caretaker of a service with a billion users, Mark Zuckerberg is used to sparking protest. Any time his company releases a new product, adjusts a privacy setting, or even tweaks the design, thousands of outraged Facebookers take to the Web to decry the change. So Zuckerberg can expect to hear sirens today, as he announces Home, Facebook’s most dramatic response to the pivot from desktop and web to phones and tablets. New paradigms like mobile can be the ill winds that blow down card-houses of tech dominance, and to maintain its status as the alpha social network, Facebook must get this right.

First, what it’s not: Home isn’t the long-rumored Facebook Phone. That was always a red herring. Instead, Home turns your phone into a Facebook device. Even with the lock screen on, a photo stream of your friends’ activities fills the screen. Updates appear on your home screen, too. What’s more, Home makes Facebook the primary means of communication on your device. The company’s messaging software merges with SMS, and you can continue using its “chat heads” to text while inside another app. Zuckerberg believes that the social network plays too big a role in its users lives to be drowned out by a vast sea of apps. “Apps aren’t the center of the world,” he says. “People are.”

Home does put people—your people—front and center. And Zuckerberg is probably hoping that most users choose it over the standard Facebook app. The catch is that not everyone can participate, even if they want to. At launch, Home is limited to a few Android phones; iPhone users are shut out. Apple enforces its own look and feel, and allowing a developer to take over the lockdown screen is currently unimaginable.

But there are plenty of things that were once unimaginable that have come to pass. One of them is the personal evolution of Facebook’s CEO. Accounts of Zuckerberg’s early years as a founder paint him as callow. But in recent appearances—and interviews like this one—he has been articulate, engaging, and at ease. Clearly Zuckerberg is at home at Facebook. Now his task is to make us all feel that way.

What led to your building Facebook Home? Facebook occupies an interesting space in mobile. We’re not an operating system, but we’re not just an app either. Facebook accounts for 23 percent of the time people spend on smartphones. The next-biggest ones are Instagram and Google Maps, which are each at 3 percent. For the past 18 months, we spent our efforts building good versions of Facebook’s mobile apps. But the design was still very close to what we have on the desktop. We knew that we could do better.

Why not just build a phone? I’ve always been very clear that I don’t think that’s the right strategy. We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.

It’s only available on Android phones. Isn’t it ironic that your mobile strategy is now tied to Google’s operating system? We have a pretty good partnership with Apple, but they want to own the whole experience themselves. There aren’t a lot of bridges between us and Google, but we are aligned with their open philosophy.

So do you think in, say, two years you will have this on the iPhone? That’s above my pay grade to be able to answer that.

That’s a pretty high pay grade. Look, I would love for that answer to be yes. Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community. We have a billion folks using our services now, and we want to get to 3 or 5 billion one day. We’re going to do that by building the best experience across all devices. Android is growing quickly, and we’re excited that the platform is open and that it allows us to build these great experiences. I think that this is really good for Google too. Something like this could encourage a lot of people to get Android phones, because I think people really care about Facebook. In a lot of ways, this is one of the best Facebook experiences that you can get. Of course, a lot of people also love iPhones—I love mine, and I would like to be able to deliver Facebook Home there as well.

Facebook now calls itself a “mobile first, mobile best” company. If you had started the company in 2013, would you have done it as a mobile app? I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a year I’ll just take a few days off and wander around and ask myself, if I were starting from scratch today, and I weren’t running Facebook, what would I build? I look at this mobile trend in light of the law of sharing, our equivalent of Moore’s law, which states that the average amount of information that a person shares doubles every year or so. Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

OK, so what is the next big trend? The big stuff that we’re seeing now is sharing with smaller groups.

How would you implement that? Do you do it within Facebook or with separate apps? There’s a place for both. There’s a place for a service that only communicates with your core friends and family, and I think that’s going to be ubiquitous. But there are other great services out there doing great things. Instagram is a good example of this. They just crossed 100 million active users. It’s a much smaller product by Facebook standards, but it’s a really meaningful product.

A lousy 100 million. It’s big, but it’s not a billion. I hope one day it will be. One of our big challenges over the next few years will be figuring out our relationships with companies that clearly have the same kind of social sharing mission. Because Instagram is part of our team, we can really work through that stuff. That experience will help improve all the things that we do with Pinterest and Foursquare and Twitter. There are some really hard problems we need to solve. If we can, it’ll make the web of all these services so much more valuable.

So you don’t want a walled garden? We’ve had a platform strategy for six years. Obviously, there aren’t many good platforms that don’t build really good first-party apps. We’re very focused on making News Feed really good, making our photos experience really good, making messaging really good, and creating great location apps. That’s the nature of a platform business of our scale. Most companies that are relevant to us will have some overlaps in some competitive way. But we choose not to be very paranoid and instead try to look for the ways that we can work with them.

Let’s talk about News Feed. People have complained that they’re missing important stories from friends and instead are seeing sponsored content. How do you find the right balance? Everything that we have seen shows that ranking content is good for people. If you only have time to look at 10 or 20 stories, it’s much better to have the best ones at the top. I think that’s a better experience than missing your cousin’s announcement that she’s pregnant, because it appears 30 stories down. We run experiments all the time where 1 percent of users get an unranked feed and all the metrics that we have show that those people’s experience is meaningfully worse.

Some of those stories may be ads, which you call “sponsored stories.” These find their way into the organic News Feed. The ad ranking doesn’t influence the organic ranking at all. Basically, for every 10 or 15 pieces of content, we insert one that’s paid. There’s no interaction between those two things. And we try to make the ads as good as possible too. Also, whenever we do some correction to show users more of what they want to see, the result is less “page” stories from businesses and brands. That makes the sponsors unhappy, even if it actually is the best thing for the billion people who are using Facebook.

You’ll please the users over the advertisers? That’s the only thing that matters.

There’s been a lot more effort to boost the business side at Facebook in recent months. Did going public force you to push the gas pedal on that? Two things happened at the same time, and I think it’s easy to conflate them. One is that we went public. But more important, a lot of usage transitioned from desktop to mobile. That’s what’s driven a lot of our decisions. We’d built a really nice business that scaled to billions of dollars on the desktop with ads only on the side of the page. But it was really a cop-out, because we weren’t tackling the hard problem of figuring out how to actually make the ads good enough to integrate with the user experience. With phones, there’s no room for a right-hand column of ads. That forced us to think about what the business looks like on mobile. But I want to push back on the idea that there’s been some wholesale shift within the company toward monetization. We’re making an even bigger investment in consumer products than we are on monetization.

Earlier you mentioned a Moore’s law of increased sharing. But some reports indicate that sharing might be leveling off. Sharing is not just about status updates doubling every year. It’s made up of all these different trends. In the beginning, people shared by filling out basic information in their profiles. Then we made it so that people could update their status. Then came photos. Now people are sharing through apps like Spotify.

We talk about the Moore’s law of sharing, but we never meant that all this will happen on Facebook—it will happen in the world. Our challenge is to make that happen on Facebook. I draw an analogy to Intel. Moore’s law was great for them, because they could point at the world and say, “OK, in 18 months, someone’s going to fit this many transistors on a circuit board—we’d better be the ones to do it or else someone is gonna eat our lunch!” I look at this the same way. Three years from now, people are going to be sharing eight to 10 times as much stuff. We’d better be there, because if we’re not, some other service will be.

But sharing can be exhausting. You hear about people taking “Facebook vacations.” It’s an interesting phenomenon. We have two ways to turn off Facebook: deactivate and delete. The group who chooses to turn Facebook off permanently is relatively small, but there’s a larger set of people who will deactivate their account for a day or two because they want to focus and study for a test—it’s the equivalent of locking yourself in the library. It’s actually a very popular feature.

Did you ever take a Facebook vacation? I don’t think I ever have. I certainly turn off my phone from time to time.

Changes made to Facebook used to reliably draw outrage, especially over privacy concerns. But when you announced Graph Search, which allows users to find more personal information shared by their friends, there wasn’t much of an outcry. What have you learned? One of the things we did a lot better this time is we talked to a lot of folks to understand the concerns of organizations and others. Typically we have an iterative approach, but here we felt, in terms of privacy, everything had to be there at the beginning. The project was actually ready to go in December, but we took an extra month to build more privacy tools.

You say Facebook follows “the Hacker Way.” How is it core to what happens here? It really is our philosophy for how we build stuff. There are a bunch of companies that try to make every release perfect, and Apple is the best at that. That’s wonderful, but there’s another way of doing things that’s potentially even better over the long term—allow yourself room to experiment and don’t try to make each individual release as polished as possible.

You’re not yet 30 and you’ve begun to make some significant charitable contributions. What’s your thinking on this? Bill Gates offered me some advice: Don’t just give your money away—it’s something that requires practice to get good at. So why wait? Clearly I have a day job that takes up 99 percent of my time, so I can’t be running a foundation. But I can take a venture capital approach, where you invest in people. I made the investment in Newark schools because I really believed in the governor and mayor over there, and they’ve delivered.

Why education? It’s not a coincidence—my wife, Priscilla, was a teacher when she graduated from Harvard. And I teach a middle school class over in East Menlo Park.

You’re teaching a class? Yeah, every week. It’s on how to build a business. Every Tuesday we go over one skill, and each group has a side project. When the class ends, they’ll come to Facebook and sell the products they’ve made, like they’re marketing them.

Speaking of people you support, you recently held a fund-raiser for New Jersey governor Chris Christie. You got a lot of crap for that. No more crap than usual. We build a service that a billion people use. It’s an important part of a lot of people’s lives. We take that really seriously, and it’s a lot of weight. The people who want to work here are the ones who relish the impact and enjoy having the responsibility of holding up that weight—the positive and the negative. Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.

Ardsley High, 2000; Photo: Corbis

Source : wired