Founder says he made ‘every mistake’ he could make in creating Facebook

Saturday, 20 November 2010 00:01 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Wellington (ANI): At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he made ‘every mistake’ he could make while creating the social networking site.

Zuckerberg was pressed on the social network’s past failings by moderator John Battelle. “There’s something about Facebook ... which is that it sort of doesn’t ask for permission, it asks for forgiveness,” Stuff.co.nz quoted Battelle as saying.

“That seems to be a Facebook trait: that [you will] keep pushing that envelope until ‘Oops, sorry’. Is that an intentional point of view?”

Zuckerberg didn’t respond until he was later asked by an audience member to explain how he had dealt with past failings. He said that users’ love of Facebook meant he was allowed to make mistakes. “I think I’ve made so many mistakes in running the company so far,” Zuckerberg said.

“Basically, any mistake that you think you can make I’ve probably made or will make in the next few years. But, I don’t know, I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you’re building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes. I just think that the lesson for other folks... is focus on building something that people really like and that’s very valuable,” he added.

He said one of the company’s board members “used to say ‘There’s 100 problems that you have to deal with right now but only one of two of them probably really matter. So just ignore the rest and put all your effort in the couple of things that really matter’.

“And I just think that for almost any industry or product that you’re in it’s just all about building products that people like. If you do that you can do so much other stuff wrong and like learn from that.”

Facebook’s only got five years left, says digital expert

Melbourne (ANI): Facebook has just five years before its audience begins to splinter, according to digital consumer expert Jeffrey Cole.

Dr. Cole, who addressed a digital marketing forum hosted by Ninemsn in Sydney, predicted the site would be no more successful than MySpace and Bebo at hanging onto the fickle teenage audience. Dr. Cole, who predicted the decline of MySpace at an earlier appearance he made for Ninemsn in Sydney four years ago, said it would take longer for Facebook’s dominance to be challenged because of its global scale.

The social network, which yesterday announced it would launch an email service, has more than 500 million users worldwide. “The same thing will happen to Facebook but it’s going to take a lot longer,” News.com.au quoted Dr. Cole as saying. And it’s not going to be replaced by one big social networking community but it’s going to fragment,” he said.

Dr. Cole is the director of the Centre for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California and a director of the World Internet Project.