The Jeff Pulver Blog: Mark Zuckerberg talks about: Facebook, Friend Lists, OpenSocial and his new Ad System

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November 07, 2007

Mark Zuckerberg talks about: Facebook, Friend Lists, OpenSocial and his new Ad System

At the Foursquare conference today I was fortunate to be in the 2nd row when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by David Faber. While there were a number of great sessions at Foursquare 2007, this was the only session of the conference that was “on-the-record.” Gone this year at foursquare were the Adidas flip-flops Mark wore to last year’s event. And for someone who is famous for his short answers, Mark was on a roll this morning during the “Face Time: Downloading Mark Zuckerberg” session.

Mark began the session talking about the Facebook Ad system. Mark said: “…we are trying to build an ad system that really aligns what our users are try to do on the site with how, would be the most effective system with partners.”

In terms of Open Social, Zukerberg, when asked “Why did you choose not to be a part of it?” He said “Who said we didn’t choose not to be a part of it?” “Well, we really didn’t find out about it until the end…maybe an hour after it launched…We have to see how it works and evaluate...we will evaluate what is the right thing to do…it is conceivable...if it does well, then it is something we will want to participate in.”

According to Mark, today Facebook has 52 million active users, as defined as people who have been on the site in the past month. Their users have been doubling every six months and it is possible for Facebook to be at 200 million users by the end of 2008.

When asked, Mark said he is visits Facebook everyday for about 2 hours a day. (Almost seems strange that I’m spending more time each day in Facebook than Mr. Zuckerberg…)

During the Question and Answers part of the session, I asked Mark about the 5,000 limit on friends and whether we will be able to segment our friends into business and personal friends and provide a different view for each group of friends. Mark confirmed this is something they are working on and this is a feature that will be available shortly.

On the way to lunch I caught up with Mark and asked him again about the 5,000 person limit on friends. Mark said that while they will not let everyone have an unlimited number of friends due to possible abuse, he could see moving the limit up from 5,000 to 10,000 or some other number.

(Jeff Jarvis also attended and blogged about this session at foursquare 2007.)