Yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg made his first public appearance since the IPO this spring. He sat down with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at the Disrupt Conference in San Francisco to discuss his vision for Facebook’s future.
Arrington wasted no time getting to the burning questions of how Zuckerberg felt about the loss of value in the stock. With all ease and confidence, Zuckerberg responded that he was disappointed, but that he has never been in this for short term gains. “We are going to do the things that we think will build value over the long term,” said Zuckerberg. He went on to tout the increase the overall number of users and the high degree of user engagement via mobile.
Zuckerberg commented that they “burned two years” going the wrong direction with the first mobile interface. But now that they have corrected that strategic mistake, they are very pleased with the native iOS app. Android users have a great app to look forward to very soon. After discussing how they have retooled the organization to build better products, Zuckerberg commented that Facebook has “…transitioned and we are now a mobile company. All of the code that is being written is mobile.”
After joking about his hopes for a Facebook phone, Arrington moved to conversation to search.
“Search is interesting. Every day we do on the order of a billion inquiries without even trying … There is a big opportunity there … The legacy of search with search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo has been type in a keyword and you would get a set of results based on those keywords. Search engines are evolving to give you answers. Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer specific questions.”
There absolutely is a team working on search. Zuckerberg said he had nothing specific to announce, but it is an obvious thing to pursue.
How much time, money, and effort will you be willing to invest if, at some undetermined point in the future, Facebook advertising could deliver the trifecta of search, social, and mobile?
Video via Wall Street Journal
