Zuckerberg had a Nixon moment tonight.
mobile.twitter.com
mobile.twitter.com
The guy is 26, and has grown up while building what's almost certainly the most significant tech company to be started since Google. Despite the challenges inherent in building a company whose currency is personal information, almost all of the major decisions that we have enough data to judge have been proved smart and non-evil in hindsight. He has hired one of the best engineering teams in the Valley. Trite as the observation may be, Facebook has tangibly improved the lives of me, my family, and almost all of my friends.
By any fair metric, he has at least earned the benefit of the doubt. And while plenty of criticism of the company's actions is justified, the bitter schadenfreude that surrounds his mis-steps is unseemly and lazy.
To the extent that Facebook has made mistakes, the speed with which social norms are changing means that no matter how good a job they do, screw-ups are almost guaranteed. This applies to everyone: Google messed up privacy in Buzz, and, despite dealing with far less private information, Twitter, too, have had various issues (e.g., leaked private tweets).
I'm embarrassed to be a part of the Valley tech industry when I come across this kind of mean-spirited pot-shot.
[Disclosure: none. I don't know him, and don't work at Facebook.]
>> The Zuckerberg hate is lame.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
But we must be critical and it is important for journalists to put him on the spot right now because on a personal level, he does not seem concerned enough with his mostly naive user base. He is very powerful, he controls a lot of information. With Google and Tesla we see a rising mantra to do genuine good in the world. Zuckerberg's public appearance at the conference in light of his leadership abilities shows a man that is hiding things and it shows a man that in my uninformed opinion will not hesitate to push the limits to see how far he can grow Facebook.
Based on the statements he has made and based on the progression of Facebook's features, I fear where facebook is headed given the amount of private data it has access to and _more_ importantly the amount of behavioral data it has access to. Just my opinion.
Facebook is proving itself to be respectful of users. They're responding to the media and fixing issues intelligently. Also, on the divisive "Draw Mo" day Facebook showed maturity (by blocking content from being viewed by people would would get offended).
I suspect that much of this hate is part ignorance (about the nature of software development) and part jealousy. From my perspective it looks like Zuck is a great CEO. I'd work with a guy with that much passion any day.
If this was buffer overflows, I might have looked the other way, but this is despicable! Perhaps if he hadn't avoided justice then, Facebook wouldn't be screwing with its users' privacy now.
It wasn't that I was a really bad person (at least I hope I wasn't) who had an evil intention to burn everything in my path, if I get chance, its simply because I was young and naive and there wasn't anyone there telling me how foolish it was to do what I was doing. I also had "Cain & Abel" setup on my computer lab and access to pretty much every single student (and faculty members) who was checking their email, myspace (facebook wasn't famous) and even their proprietary class management system with access to attendance/grading/unique school ids of each students and personal comments by instructor on student or class and what not.
Thankfully I have short attention span, and soon I got bored of it and moved to something else. If I was caught doing what I was doing, I would almost surely be in jail or at least expelled from school.
Now, sometimes I think of those naive things that I did when I was young and I shake my head.
Case in point. When you are young you do a lot of stupid stuff, its not fair to judge people by what they did when they were young (even if it only 5-6 years ago). People can change drastically on their way to adulthood. I don't know Mark Zuckerberg in person to judge what kind of person he is, I don't think it is fair to judge him based on what he might have done when he was younger.
He's trying. He's doing it with passion. It's not easy. Yes, he has made bad decisions, some unethical choices. But in all honesty, I'm not sure either one of us wouldn't have screwed up in a position like that. Google essentially had three guys making the big decisions with Eric Schmidt to look over Larry and Sergey's shoulders. Facebook has essentially been Zuckerberg throughout.
Criticizing, laughing at, mocking - that is easy, people. Let's not be those guys.
Not that I worry about Zuckerberg. He'll be fine. He'll probably get better at public speaking in the future and keep running a successful company.
As such, I relished the fact that he was sweating up there. This is good. Why? There's nothing like body language to get the truth out of someone. And because I hope this brings even more attention to the privacy issue.
http://video.allthingsd.com/video/d8-video-under-mark-zucker...
Those couple characters, while written by the venerable Mr. Calacanis, are less than interesting.
What is the scandal? I wish I could downvote this story. His answer was nonsensical because he was nervous and hot as hell, not because he didn't really have an answer.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/02/...
The moment being referred to here is the Presidential debate, "26 September 1960... at the CBS broadcast facility in downtown Chicago" between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
Nixon made a tactical error in appearing on TV that night, by not following the advice of make-up artists and following the lead of Kennedy who looked good on television. The result? Nixon had a 9 o'clock shadow and shifty.
So really the mistake made by Zuckerberg as a leader is one of perception, not necessarily a mistake of substance.
"... “I recognized the basic mistake I had made,” Nixon would write in 6 Crises. “I had concentrated too much on substance and not enough on appearance. I should have remembered that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ ” ..."
You can read more of the debate here, "Presidential Debates: Fifty Years of High-Risk TV, The First Presidential Debate" ~ http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14104-8/presidential-...
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/zuckerberg-on-the-h...
Bill G also had a meltdown. Tears and all. Anyone remember?