Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on company strategy at the F8 conference
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, recently gave a presentation on the future of the company and Alley Insider liveblogged the conference:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/live-mark-zuckerberg-at-f8
I’m excerpting some of the major points that relate to setting strategy for an innovative company.
On enforcing standards for third party developers:
* Make decisions based on their track record rather than isolated incidents.
On copycat competitors:
* Sometimes it’s better to work with similar companies, but if it is a complete copy then it’s fine to go after them.
On finding a company purpose:
* It can be important to travel and go to new surroundings in order to clear your mind (the destination was Istanbul, in Zuckerberg’s case).
On creating compelling content:
* By empowering other people to share, you enhance the capabilities of your site.
On feeds:
* News feeds and friend feeds lead to a virtuous cycle of sharing.
On nurturing developers:
* It’s a step in the right direction to make your ecosystem available to developers, but you really need to provide additional support to truly make your platform a major player.
On decentralization:
* Decentralizing applications and allowing individuals to share them on other sites leads to powerful rates of growth.
On creating great applications (from Ben Ling, Director of Platform Program Management)
* Great applications should be”
Meaningful (social, useful, expressive, engaging)
Trustworthy (secure, respectful, transparent)
Well designed (clean, fast, robust)