Facebook Interviewer Heckled at Web Conference 179
jriding writes "Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old billionaire, was the keynote speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy took the stage to question Zuckerberg, but the audience quickly grew tired of the topics she focused on, claiming that the real issues were being ignored.
"Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview," claimed audience member, Jason Pontin." The audience apparently wanted to know more about privacy and portability issues, which I guess shouldn't surprise anyone here.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were Mark, I would hire a suit, and put him in front of the crowds, while I stood off to the side and wait for the 'inspirational answer' about the dreamy-dream utopian future and how my software was going to make it happen.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Interesting)
The BBC ran a Money Programme show about social sites earlier in the year and a lot of the people interviewed were shocked and disappointed that their information was being skimmed for advertising purposes. They just wanted to be left alone to enjoy their online embroidery circles, or whatever. But at the end of the day someone has to pay. Assuming you're unable or unwilling to disable the ads isn't it better to be looking at TARGETTED ads rather than random ones?
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:2, Interesting)
A good example is something like a carpet cleaner. I never had to worry about such things before I got my own apartment/house. But when I inevitably spilled something I went to Target and bought one of them. I bought Resolve because I knew about it from TV or something stupid*, and it worked on the stain. So we all win, right?
It might also have been on sale, as that's generally how I buy something
Re:Too bad... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
The interviewer just didn't do a good job, and was in front of people who witnessed it. The audience should have been more mature, the interviewer should have been more prepared, and a kid who sold his company for a staggering amount of money should have been more interesting.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't survive and "do whatever you want" on 300K+ a year (for "several million") in interest income you're seriously being wasteful with your money. Or you're trying to buy shit that costs millions of dollars, which is generally being wasteful with your money, but agreeably doesn't fall into the category "whatever you want to do".
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf [berkshirehathaway.com]
To hit 10% a year, the DOW would close at 24,000,000. One way to look at it is to ask, are things going to improve more this century than they improved last century, or less(the upside is that if they improve more, money will get less and less important, so it will be hard to miss out on).
The whole Malthusian folly comes into play, current projections can't really foresee radical future changes, but I don't think it is self evident that the progress made in the last 100 years will be repeated(especially in terms of things like resource extraction and farming, which saw enormous gains in productivity).
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:3, Interesting)
He picked a bad example when he went for the orange juice. I have an empty carton of organic orange juice next to me right now - tastes much nicer than the non-organic and far, far better than the dilutable stuff. But in both your case and mine, we have come to that conclusion ourselves. It's not marketing that makes the organic stuff taste better. Our choice is informed by a different source of information (experience in this case) rather than advertising. So I agree with what you say but draw a different conclusion - marketing is not necessary in this case for me to make an optimal choice and the only possible effect of marketing is to lead me to make an non-optimal choice.Take any argument to extremes or apply it in all cases and it's going to break down, but I would often agree with the OP who said that directed marketing has a negative effect on the viewer.