Today in Facebook’s third town hall Q&A session — its first international one — Mark Zuckerberg answered questions from an audience and the internet about the social network.
Can you install an “I’ve read this button” so we can stop reading posts over and over again?
A lot of people ask why Facebook’s Newsfeed isn’t in order; people get confused about why they see posts multiple times in their feed.
Zuckerberg said that “if you have a hundred friends on Facebook, there are probably hundreds or a thousand things that are possible stories you might see” but the problem is “most people don’t spend all day on Facebook.” The company shows the most interesting ones so you see them in the time you’re on the social network.
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He also pointed out that the company gets “a lot more complaints when we don’t rank the feed.”
How do you imagine Facebook in ten years?
“There are a few different big trends” that are going to change how we connect, Zuckerberg said. First, he wants to reach two-thirds of the internet within 10 years and is pushing hard on that point.
Second, Zuckerberg thinks that the platform will completely change. He said if you look at the example of shifts every “10 to 15 years” from the desktop PC to mobile phones, what’s next is just as important.
“We can imagine there will be another platform that’s more natural and more built into our lives than right now” he said. In the future, he believes it’ll be a wearable device — like glasses — that “doesn’t look weird like some of the stuff we have today” and enhances the experience without taking away from the real world.
What’s one opinion people have about Facebook that you’d like to change?
“People don’t realize how much we care about our community” said Zuckerberg. “People interpret our actions through the lens of, oh, they’re just trying to do that to get money.” One of the questions that people often ask is that Facebook’s work with Internet.org is just to get more people on Facebook and to make more money.
Zuckerberg said that if that was the case, he would just send people to work on its ad products instead of getting people connected. “A lot of people assume that when we do an action, it’s in our business interest to do so, but we […] actually want to get our services in front of as many people as possible.”
What was the moment you came up with Facebook?
Zuckerberg said that it’s often misconstrued that it was just him coming up with the social network.
“One of the biggest things the media gets wrong about building companies is that ideas do not just come to you.” He thinks it’s much more of a journey and the media also makes it sound like “one person or a small number of people did something” and that it’s more.
Zuckerberg believes this discourages people from building things because it makes it look easier than it is; “anyone can sit down and build something together.”
The full video from Facebook’s third town hall event can be viewed here.
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