Good morning DLD10 - Welcome to Day 2! We're kicking off with the first session in room "Maximiliamssaal" ...
stage is still empty
Now Steffi Czerny welcoming the guests for Day 2, a really packed day
David Kirkpatrick (Fortune) now taking over, he interviewed Marc Zuckerberg last year at DLD ... he wants to continue this with Mike Schroepfer
so first topic "Facebook", Schroepfer was with Mozilla before
DK asking "what makes Facebook more than a website?"
Mike answers as an engineer: "platforms" open up to a much larger crowd
"We let the entire world build the best tools for each and every usage"
Sorry, small session mix-up on our side. Now you should be seeing it right.
"It's certainly possible that FB in 10 years is not about facebook.com anymore"
Facebook is a hub to connect: Think API, platform, interconnection.
Now the Stream API / FacebookConnect features ...
A problem Facebook is facing: The service is changing so quickly that often the users can't keep up. (No wonder with their 350m+user base!)
DK: is it a problem to offer the new services and API when a huge part of the usership always almonst revolts against them, seeing them as "totally changing" FB every time?
You want to crack open the market as quickly as possible.
FB indeed had some bad decisionmaking when pushing new stuff to the market ...
Mike: but we are listening to complaints
M.S. : "Change is hard for everyone. But we have to be constantly changing. Our Product has to follow the market, so we have to experiment and see what people can do with it and adjust."
Interesting to hear how much Facebook is trying to change and adapt quickly.
and are willing to immediately react to this...
over 350 Million users now
The FB "newsfeed" increased usage stats dramatically when it was introduced ... a "social shift"
Note: In the past, whenever Facebook introduced major changes (like introducing the newsfeed), there was major pushback from the users. In hindsight, Facebook turned out to often hit the spot (sometimes after some tweaking).
Privacy discussion now: time of privacy over?
Ah, moving on to a touchy subject: Default privacy settings.
Mike clarifies: We think, and what Marc Zuckerberg said, people are just getting more comfortable with sharing
A lot of the location-based services are by default public, Facebook just switched the default from private to public.
The challenge is: give people control options in general for the whole platform and over single posts and details
FB offering a wizard to check the privacy settings now, people actually caring about those options more now ...
YOU should also check the new settings RIGHT after this session ;-)
It's a huge challenge to give users the kind of granular control about privacy they should have.
Giving people the power to define who they are is the challenge.
(Sounds like we're hearing more about challenges than solutions. Users will be calling FB out on this one...)
The quantity of stuff that users should be able to control keeps growing rapidly...
For FB it's all about giving folks the ability to self-replicate...
M.S. "If you look tracking cookies on advertising website, you don't realize that you're being tracked. So on Facebook you can regulate what people know about you and who's tracking you"
What's extra tough about this control is to keep it simple and understandable: how can you automate this stuff so you don't end up with hundreds of checkboxes cluttering your interface?
During his time at Mozilla, Mike had a very similar challenge: how to give users the ability to manage a really complex system in a simple way?
The total number of status updates on FB are rumored to be at least 10x the number of blogposts ever written. (No hard data on this one, but pretty likely...)
"For many people, FB is a very individual experience."
That's because your newsfeed is a highly customized experience.
3.5 billion items of information are shared on FB every week. (phew!)
We're extending the session now by getting the others on stage:
You can find the new panel members' bios above this live blog.
Dave Morgan of Simulmedia confirms that it's hard to connect the hard data and infrastructure with the humans using those.
