Zuckerberg Speaks — No, Really! — at the SXSW Facebook Developer Garage

Today’s Facebook developer garage was a lot more satisfying than yesterday’s very scripted conversation between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy. Zuckerberg took the stage for a good 45 minutes to take questions from the crowd.

He wasn’t as open as I would have liked, but I did get more of a sense of who he is and what his vision will be. During a question from a gentleman who wanted to know why there is no network for Palestine, he revealed that Facebook will one day move away from top-down dictated networks and instead, allow users to build their own networks.

He also talked about Facebook’s concerns with regard to moving their service into China as they continue to internationalize.

Yesterday, I wrote that the problem with the Zuckerberg keynote wasn’t Sarah Lacy. The “conversation” between the two of them felt scripted because it was scripted. I stand by most of what I wrote, although I have to say that given his response to the Q&A today, I’d say that Zuckerberg may not love his bubble as much as I thought he did.

I had a lot of impressions throughout Zuckerberg’s talk, and I tweeted each of them. Here are my tweets — and the relevant tweets of my friends — in chronological order:

• Me: Zuckerberg is taking questions from this developer audience. I asked him what he’d like to see developers build that would patch some holes
• Me: Zuckerberg gave me kind of a non-answer. I want to know what he would like to see developers build that would really add value to his vision
• Me: Still, even though he’s still being a closed book. I do appreciate the fact that he’s here and talking to us.
• Eston Bond: @tetesegehen what holes? product holes or feature holes?
• Me: @eston feature holes, like privacy stuff we were talking about last night. Or not being able to hold onto content that people share
• Eston: @tetesegehen you couldn’t fix that kind of stuff through platform anyway. that’d be like trying to patch a windows feature by installin word
• Me: @eston did you see what the drop.io guys were talking about?
• @eston They’re building a private place within Facebook to share and permission information. That strikes me as a stopgap measure.
• Me: What is the view on sharing information with the government? Good question!
• Me: I’m really glad that Facebook is taking the China and privacy issue seriously.
• Me: I love this Q&A, I have much more of a sense of who Zuckerberg is than from the keynote. His eyes light up when he talks about geekery.
• Me: @scobleizer is asking Zuckerberg some very tough questions about people getting kicked off.
• Me: Zuckerberg says that there’s a standard appeals process, he doesn’t think it’s true that people can’t get back into the site.
• Me: Zuckerberg says that they’re going to allow users to create their own networks in the future. “Facebook Curmudgeons” network, anyone?

What I really got out of this talk — apart from all the geeky insights — is that Facebook is more open that it first appears. They really do care about reaching out to the developer community. The problem is that they are not yet reaching out beyond the developers.

Ordinary users — like some of my friends who are still in college, or older people — are fed up with all the application invites, multiple inputs and user interface conventions they don’t understand. Those are the issues that Facebook will need to increasingly connect with users over.

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