Techcrunch40: Keynote Chat - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Arrington.

Chat starts with a discussion about traffic growth over the past year. Mike notes that SV now uses facebook and everyone raises their hand that they have a facebook account.

A year ago launched a news feed and a mini-feed. Mark: I don't think we did a good job of communicating what the feature did. What we found is to take a step back, give people the controls they needed, and also to take the time to explain what it was doing.

In May, they launched a platform - huge event in SF. Mike - what the hell is a social graph. Mark - the concept is that you take all the people and all of their friends is a social graph - each friend is a node. It's not that there is a social graph, its just there. We try to model it and map it out. We can then expose them to other applications.

Mike - given all the demo info you have on all of the users you have - when can people expect to hear things on advertising? Mark - we have several interesting advertising options - including sponsored profiles. Over the next 3-6 months there will be a lot of innovation coming.

Mike - I counted 4000 apps - Mark - 80,000 developers registered

Mike - Some applications received massive user adoption quickly - many were doing it with black hat - he talks about the tricks they do to get users on the apps - has the exploits caused any pain?

Mark - one of the fundamental decisions we had to make was to either choose the people we were working with or go decentralized. We have tried to be pretty responsive and we are thankful because we wanted to roll it out quickly. We thank the community for helping us and constantly iterating.

Mike - respond to this - plugging holes as you find them makes sense - but what about the companies that exploited - no punishment?

Mark - we adjusted the metrics recently to deal with this - we switched to engaged users - as time goes on - we will expand in differnet ways.

Mike - should a new startup go with web only or create just a facebook app - some seem to do better on the facebook platform than outside.

Mark - the system isn't identical to the rest of the web - a whole set of apps can grow better inside facebook

Mike - the messaging system is one of my pet peeves - i dont have access to it in mac mail - recently you started allowing people to start sending emails outside of facebook - is it coming for pop/imap support?

Mike - can you comment on any new funding?

Mark - what i can say is that where we are at the point now - it would be because we want to do it and not because we have to do it

Mike - what are you going to do to support the ecosystem?

Mark - what we want to do is make it as easy as possible to get started and to grow active users. Is to help them line up funding - what we are announcing today with Facebook Fund - FBFUND - any app developer can submit a startup and if we think the project is good, we will give a grant to help these companies get off the ground.