At Tuesday's Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg opened up about his plans and some of his recently launched Facebook products. He also talked extensively about building on top of the FB platform--encouraging entrepreneurs and engineers alike to go for it. The day before this interview, Zuckerberg had just announced his latest baby: Facebook Messaging, (still in its third trimester of pregnancy), the president of FB recalled the brainstorming by saying, "We went to this looking not to build an email product, but thinking about what would be more like a messaging system, if we re-thought this from scratch."
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| Mark Zuckerberg at the WEB 2.0 Summit, 2010 |
The Zuck is talking about a "new messaging system" that breaks down the letter format--eliminating the subject line, the body of the letter, and even the need to have a closing signature. Good question: Then what exactly are we left with? The young CEO intends on diluting all forms of messaging (whether it's an email, an IM or FB message) into IM formatting--perhaps a subconscious reminiscent of Zuck's IM-ing college years. But seriously all jokes aside, Zuckerberg admits to getting his inspiration to create what he describes as the "future messaging system," from his girlfriend's little sister, who's still in high school. The young student told him she thought email was too slow, and that most of the other kids she knows uses BBM or Facebook. Much to his relief about the latter, this stroke an "aha moment" in the celebrity entrepreneur's head, "Aha, must create a new messaging system for the future!"
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| John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing, Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media Inc, interviewing Mark Zuckerberg at WEB 2.0 |
One of the features the product promises is to record all the on-going digital conversations with the ones you love, while placing said messages on top of the hierarchy amongst others, like bills or deal of the day reminders. Although it seems the plan to curtail the quality of the letter down to a sort of texting dialect might possibly endanger the quality of the written English language, which as it appears, Zuckerberg isn't too concerned with, nevertheless have a watch at the full interview below-- it's always interesting to see one of the youngest geniuses of our times talk about: his daily worries, where he sees Facebook in the future, and what he wants from other builders to build on top of his social network.
A Conversation With Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010
(Note that at 55mins in, the video jumps back about 9 minutes. Fast forward to 104 to re-adjust).
