Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes. It is a great interview!
My brother mentioned to me a few weeks ago seeing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes.1 This interview by Lesley Stahl with Mark didn’t disappoint.
The interview can be found in Kara Swisher article “Facebook: The Entire ‘60 Minutes’ Segment”2 Unlike Kara, I didn’t expect a “big wet kiss”, but Kara always compliments her excellent journalism with cynical editorial — for some reason I really enjoy it.
Kara also complains about no mention of MySpace, but I wonder how much rivalry there really is for 60 Minutes’ audience. I know very few people personally that are active on MySpace — and those that are, are almost all are in bands.
I also disagree that “it hits all the high (and low) points of the Facebook saga”. It’s hits make for a balanced 15 minute piece. It misses the headlines in the news about children’s safety on Facebook and the Beacon fiasco being near deja vu of the News Feed and Mini-Feed fiasco a year before.
It also likely ends with a negative feeling for Mark and the Facebook team. Possibly, by reordering and going into more detail on the highs, people might appreciate what a phenomenon Facebook is — but maybe it isn’t necessary as people already know it is, because they are using it each week.
Likely not (yet) interesting to the 60 Minutes audience is Facebook’s contributions to open source. My former Flock co-worker Ari Steinberg build and announced the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox
All my circles of friend and acquaintances at least known of Facebook, and many use it regularly. I greatly admire the Facebook experience and Mark and teams ability to solve problems others either haven’t tried or have failed at.
Friday, Feb 1st Update: Kara Swisher yeterday reported Chatty Zuckerberg Tells All About Facebook Finances which includes:
Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 to $350 million.
More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.
By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.
Danny Sullivan, Dave Mcclure, and others comment that it doesn’t sound like an inviting situation for potential employees hoping to make their fortunes. But Baher Al Hakim suggests this is a “a more-realistic financial outlook” and that there is opportunity to exceed these, because to date they have been so unsuccessful in getting money off their customers.
- Embarrassingly, even as a kid, I enjoyed 60 Minutes. [↩]
- Disclosure: we host Kara’s blog and all of All Things D. [↩]