Today I went to an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. NPR's Guy Raz interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and The Facebook Effect's author David Kirkpatrick. The discussion was preceded by a reception with lots of small tasty foods.
The discussion itself was interesting. Zuckerberg speaks at great length in response to questions - it's quite clear that he's passionate about what he's building. Guy Raz asked a good deal of questions pertaining to data security, responsibility, and privacy, most of which were answered in a politically-correct fashion. The thing that struck me as most interesting was that Zuckerberg comes off as having no respect for people behaving differently in different social groups - he described such behavior as lacking integrity. In some sense, yes, behaving two opposite ways would be without integrity; however, he seemed to fail to grasp the concept that in different groups you would highlight different subsets of who you are. Perhaps he is wholly the same person to everyone, but his users are not. This all hot on the heels of the presentation Julia Grace gave yesterday morning, in which she described the largest problem people have with Facebook being the fact that it's difficult to separate your membership in different social groups from each other. Perhaps his seeming misunderstanding explains this issue - Facebook is the social network platform that Zuckerberg would want to use, just as the iPhone is the phone that Steve Jobs wants to use.
Making a product that's exactly what you yourself want provides a lot of motivation, but it seems it can blind you to the desires of other users.