Zuckerberg: 'I don't have a proper bed'

Seeing as titbits of information about Facebook tend to be gobbled up rather like food at a frat party, it's worth trawling through the interview the company's 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to 60 Minutes last night.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the 'curious but largely inconsequential' things we learnt about Mr Zuckerberg:

1. His bed has no legs. (He sleeps on a mattress on the floor.)

2. He plays Scrabulous - a tool which enables Facebook users to play Scrabble - with his grandparents.

3. He doesn't have his own office - his desk sits on an open plan floor alongside those of the company's 400 other employees.

4. He won't say what he makes of suggestions he is the new Larry or Sergey - a reference to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. ("Is that a question?", he said, when the show's Leslie Stahl suggested he was replacing them as the most important guy in Silicon Valley.)

Elsewhere, there was slightly meatier material - notably in his reiteration that the company would not go public for at least another two or three years. (In October Microsoft bought a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook, valuing the company at $15 billion and sparking suggestions that it may be about to list.)

"What I can announce is that it's highly unlikely Facebook will go public in 2008," Mr Zuckerberg said. "When it makes sense, we'll do it. Maybe it's two years out, maybe it's three years."

He also defended a feature Facebook introduced last year which allows companies to attach advertisements to messages sent between users when they do things elsewhere on the web, for instance make purchases.

Beacon, which effectively enables a type of word-of-mouth marketing, was widely criticised by the campaign group MoveOn.org and others for invading people's privacy, to the point where Facebook has now changed it so that users have to give their consent before advertisements are attached.

"I actually think (Beacon) makes Facebook less commercial," Mr Zuckerberg said. "What would you rather see? An ad from Bloomingdales? Or a message from a friend saying they bought a scarf?"

The more interesting issue, perhaps, was why Facebook chose the mainstream 60 Minutes programme on CBS to run a 'Meet Mr Facebook' piece in the first place - a question which touches on the site's relatively poor growth in the US compared to other territories.

In the year to November, Facebook's US audience grew by 89 per cent - from 7.3 per cent to 13.7 per cent of the online population, according to Nielsen Online. In the UK, by comparison, it grew by 1,478 per cent (1.7 per cent to 26.7 per cent), in Australia by 1,273 per cent (0.3 per cent to 20 per cent), in France, 1,171 per cent.

Why the variation?

"One reason is just how dominant MySpace is in the US," a Nielsen Online spokesman said. "The US is the only country where MySpace is bigger than Facebook - it got early critical mass, and it goes to show just how hard it is to get people to migrate once they have established themselves in one social network."

Comments

[Oliver C]

The stats about the increase in the use was phenomenal. I knew that in the past year, the majority of people I know have gotten a facebook but six months before we all had Myspace, there is something about Facebook which makes the user more comfortable than the latter. In regards to Zucker commenting about the ad's, I agree- it's better to see these ad's than to recieve messages (like I do in Myspace) where it's an ad... there is less control in the latter...
Anyway, I very easily moved from one to the other and become much more comfortable in using Facebook...