
Mark Zuckerberg's plan for the future of Facebook - technologizer
http://www.fastcompany.com/3052885/mark-zuckerberg-facebook
======
hedgew
"We are taking a data-driven, product-driven approach to doing good in the
world."

If anything - if research is to be trusted - all they've done is make a
billion people slightly unhappier by manipulating the way people socialize.

If Facebook has done good; show me the data.

So far the data seems to indicate that internet.org is comparable to releasing
swarms of burrowing parasites upon the poorest of the world.

~~~
cauterize
If Facebook hadn't existed (nor any other high profile social network) I
wouldn't have been invited to half the social events I've attended. Thus, I
have a lot more friends than I did. Some data.

~~~
eggie
I bet you would have just as many friends without facebook. That's limited by
your capacity to make friends, not the social media you use.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Social media _expands_ one's capability to make (and more importantly, keep)
friends, especially if one's busy and/or not an extrovert.

~~~
eggie
The idea that social media can do this is the central conceit of facebook. A
friendship maintained solely because of an entry in a database is not the same
as one driven by the memories of the participants. You are not extending your
ability to make friends. You are engaging in something fundamentally different
from friendship.

Look at the effects--- facebook depresses people, but meeting real people in
real life makes us happy. You will say you need facebook to know where the
next party is and meet those people, but that's like saying you need to smoke
to meet people at bars.

Friendship isn't a token. It's a continued process of communication and
exchange. You are not extending your capacity for friendship by submitting
your life details to a social network.

EDIT: grammar

~~~
Dirlewanger
With regards to the original guy who said he went to social events from
Facebook, you completely missed the point.

------
sparkzilla
>Sandberg: Mark said, ‘I’m going to make a marshmallow,’ " she tells me in her
conference room, which is adorned with a framed drawing of her as Spider-
Woman. "I looked at my friend and said, ‘He’s going to make the perfect
marshmallow.’ Because he’s going to be the one out of all of us who is going
to have the patience. In order to make the right marshmallow, you can’t do it
right in the fire, because then it gets burnt. You can’t walk away. You
actually have to sit there for five to 10 minutes with the marshmallow above
the flame, but not too close, so that it gets completely heated but doesn’t
burn. And the only person who’s actually willing to do that is Mark. Because
he is that focused and that determined. I’ve never met anyone with more
perseverance than Mark Zuckerberg.

Coming soon to a VC interview: The s'mores test. Burn it and you're toast.

~~~
ojbyrne
Honestly, that was the best anecdote they could come up with? Whatever PR
person approved that should be fired. I'm pretty sure 90% of 10 year old boys
would pass that test.

~~~
jmhobbs
Also, who puts it above the flame? By the coals is where you want to be.

------
dovdov
TL;DR: "I want my ads and stolen video contents in every last dug hole in the
world, so you can like a starving child directly!" /s

------
roymurdock
I found the article pretty hard to read...it did not have a clear structure or
narrative, had some weird, pithy quotes [1] [2] [3], and generally felt more
like a puff piece written by a breathless admirer than serious journalism.

But the main takeaway seems to be the "very clear" 5-10 year R&D roadmap for
Oculus:

> Oculus, then, represents two big bets in one: that VR will be the next major
> computing platform, supplanting phones the same way that handheld devices
> usurped desktops—and that human nature won’t change. "If you look at how
> people spend time on all computing platforms, whether it’s phones or
> desktops before that, about 40% is spent on some kind of communications and
> media," Zuckerberg says. "Over the long term, when [Oculus] becomes a more
> mature platform, I would bet that it’s going to be that same 40% of the time
> spent doing social interactions and things like that. And that’s what we
> know. That’s what we can do."

Seems logical that VR is going to be FBs next big play, and their ability to
get a good product to market relatively soon will be crucial. It's astounding
how much revenue they are still able to pull in from a botspammed, broken
advertising model on a product that (from my observations of friends/app store
comments) is declining in popularity in the US, one of the most lucrative
segments.

[1] "This is not big data," says Bordes, who is wearing a T-shirt depicting a
robot boxing a dinosaur. "This is supersmall data."

[2] "I personally called up the guy who’s leading our laser-communications
effort, who was working at [NASA’s] Jet Propulsion Laboratory," he recalls.
"And he said, ‘What? Why are you calling me?’ And I said, ‘Because we’re
connecting the world, and I want you to come in and meet the team, and this is
something that’s really important to me, and I think we can make a big
difference.’ " Even in the retelling, Zuckerberg makes it sound urgent.

[3] Yael Maguire director, Connectivity Lab: "Our focus is technologies that
can advance the state of the art by at least an order of magnitude. We don’t
want to make something better by a factor of two or three, because the rest of
the industry is going to do that."

~~~
macavity23
Agreed. The Oculus acquisition still has me scratching my head. I don't doubt
that VR will be a major technology, if the Oculus manages to follow up on the
promise of the DK. But it seems so very different to FB's current market and
core competency.

Where are the synergies? Display ads within VR? From the reaction of visceral
disgust I've seen to ads on the apple watch, I can't see anyone putting up
with them in the Oculus.

Maybe they're keeping something Insanely Great up their sleeve, but from their
total failure to do anything at all with whatsapp or instagram, I'm not
hopeful.

~~~
roymurdock
I think the nature of ads is fundamentally changing from clear-cut commercials
and poorly-integrated pop ups towards product placement, PR/ad firm trend
manufacturing, and "native content" \- aka ads that read as serious articles
without disclosure.

It would be easy to make the best ads ever through VR. Sprinkle some coke
bottles and billboards into whatever first generation games come out for
Oculus. For immersion's sake, of course. Create a Coke Cafe where you can talk
to your friends in a virtual environment for free. The best part? You don't
have to pay for physical objects or real estate. Create a few models, pay the
dev studio/Facebook, and you're done.

Rather than being constrained by a screen (TV, computer, Apple Watch), VR ads
could have so much room for creativity given a fully immersive and completely
absorbing experience. And, just like Facebook and Snapchat have done to drive
user growth, if we stay ahead of the adoption curve we probably won't see them
until the tech is boring anyways.

There's a fine line between great ads, games, movies, shows, etc. - they're
all different forms of entertainment w/ different agendas and different
reasons for existing, but if they entertain, that's all that matters at the
end of the day.

------
mentos
I do not really see Mark as much of an innovator. He has said himself that he
did not sell facebook early on because he did not think he'd have an idea as
great and had no use for the money given his lifestyle.

Innovation has come from the ground up with companies like Instagram - which
facebook has purchased - but what has purchasing innovation done for facebook?
Seems like people don't want to be at Mark's party so he went and bought the
building the next party was in..

I see purchasing Oculus to try to 'own' VR kind of like buying AOL in '98 to
try to own the internet.

I feel like this is taking a technology and trying to see what features you
can provide rather than asking what features you need and then finding the
technology necessary to provide them..

------
mroll
I don't know about the rest of you, but I know a lot of people, myself
included, who have the patience to roast a golden brown marshmallow. I've only
heard good things about Sandberg, but that seemed like a really weak anecdote
to depict one of the world's most innovative people.

~~~
progmal1
It was odd anecdote, You should roast it beside the coals. Above the flame
will give you soot.

~~~
Schwolop
It was an odd anecdote. You should set it on fire then quickly blow it out and
wolf it down.

Done is better than perfect.

------
Sven7
Mark Zuckerberg isn't really a person.

He represents a class of extremely misguided super smart rich people who
convince themselves they are doing good by getting themselves richer.

~~~
astazangasta
"If you are rich, you must, by definition, be doing good since you are
providing a valued service that people are paying for." This is the logic;
find it in this very thread.

~~~
tjr
I think there are methods of becoming rich that pretty clearly do not involve
doing "good", but even so, since Facebook users are not paying for the
service, the most we could conclude here is that Facebook is doing good for
advertisers. That may well be true.

------
hanspeter
Genuine question: Why does Facebook and Zuckerberg get such a hard time on HN
when Google and Brin/Page doesn't? They basically have the same supposedly
shabby business model.

~~~
Jgrubb
Totally upsupported supposition - maybe because Zuck basically is in the same
age bracket as a lot of the population on here, whereas Larry and Sergey are a
bit older?

~~~
hanspeter
Could be. Another difference is how they came to success. Zuckerberg solved an
"easy" problem building a social network web app whereas the Google founders
solved a "hard" problem building search engine algorithms.

~~~
sparkzilla
He didn't solve any problem. He stole the Winklevosses work.

~~~
hanspeter
The Winklevosses didn't do any work. They wanted someone to build them a
dating site for Harvard students.

He was an asshole in their business relationship and should have stopped
working with them the minute he was inspired to create Facebook. But he didn't
steal anything that belonged to them. They would not have succeeded with their
original idea even if they found a developer to do all the work for them.

~~~
sparkzilla
The Winklevosses already had a substantial part of the project done, and it
was more than a dating site. In fact, Zuckerberg copied the Winklevosses
feature to connect people. In the absence of competition it seems likely that
the Winklevosses product would have been successful. Zuckerberg admits they
were well known on campus and would have promoted the site well. The key
determining factor in the success of Facebook was not the quality of the
software, or even its features, but that it was first social network
introduced to the closed Harvard internal market.

[http://newslines.org/mark-zuckerberg/?order=ASC](http://newslines.org/mark-
zuckerberg/?order=ASC)

------
wahsd
All your internets are belong to us. Resistance is futile.

What was the date for Genisys to launch again? Some time in October 2017?

