All Things Digital

I read with great interest your recent interview with Kara Swisher at the D6 Conference. I was particularly struck by your answer to Kara Swisher’s question about whether Facebook, the popular social-networking site you created, can be sold by your venture capital co-owners without your approval. Your response: “I don’t think so.”

Your answer made me think of something my own professor at London Business School once said to me: “The day you take a venture capital investment is the day you sell your company.” Venture capital firms are not Warren Buffett–they have limited-term funds and compensation mechanisms that encourage them to exit their transactions once a company reaches maturity.

So, is it true that your co-owners can sell without you or otherwise push through an initial public offering of Facebook without your approval as chief executive officer?

Well, the answer is maybe.

Read the rest of this post

Facebook applications don’t really do anything special yet. Neither, for that matter, do Facebook’s ads. But that’s OK, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg insisted yesterday at the D6 conference. Some of the applications, like Slide’s SuperPoke, are really popular. Just like Elvis, she says.The comparison fails on two counts.

First, we’ve listened to Elvis Presley, Ms. Sandberg, and SuperPoke is no Elvis Presley. Second, Elvis was a moneymaker–heck, he still is. The Elvis 30 #1 Hits album, released in 2002, has sold 16 million copies at $15 a pop. Conveniently, that adds up to $240 million–the same amount Microsoft paid for its 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. And what did Microsoft get? A company whose COO still can’t articulate what, precisely, Facebook’s advertising revolution will look like.

Read the rest of this post

The Associated Press reported yesterday that it was able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

Read the rest of this post

I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy’s Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum onstage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the microscope: Zuckerberg. As a speaker, Facebook’s CEO is trying to model himself after Steve Jobs. He’s gotten help from Bill Clinton’s former speaking coach. But so far, all he’s learned is the fine art of saying nothing.

Read the rest of this post

So I’m still in shock at what happened a few hours ago at SXSW during the Sarah Lacy interview of Mark Zuckerberg. I’d like to be nice about it and I feel for Sarah, but to be brutally honest I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a complete and utter train wreck of an interview before.

Read the rest of this post

Last year, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg suggested that a PC operating system was the inspiration for Facebook’s new “Platform.” With Platform, anyone could write applications for Facebook. Facebook’s in-house applications would get no special treatment, he declared. The analogy to an operating system is appealing. For many years Microsoft’s Windows operating system has benefited from the large number of applications written by outside developers. People buy Windows, not necessarily because it is the best operating system, but because it has the most applications. Like Microsoft, Facebook does not have a monopoly on great ideas nor unlimited bandwidth, and a platform ostensibly allows Facebook to leverage the talents of the entire developer community to its benefit.

Read the rest of this post

Yesterday marked Facebook’s four-year anniversary, or to look at it from the college perspective to which the site owes its success: Facebook graduated. Washington Post assistant editor Rachel Dry, who was a senior at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his college dorm room on Feb. 4, 2004, wrote a commencement address for The New Republic. In it, Dry wonders if Facebook is taking “on the big inequities,” as Bill Gates–like Zuckerberg, a famous Harvard dropout–urged in his commencement speech at the university last year. We wondered the same thing.

Read the rest of this post