Why Facebook Is (Probably) Turning To Android To Make Mobile Even More Social

Earlier today we published the full transcript of an engrossing, detailed interview we had with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that focused primarily on the social network’s mobile plans. During our conversation, he talked about how Facebook would ideally like to make your entire phone social: enter your login information once, and your apps should know about your interests and who your friends are. Compelling as that may sound (assuming you aren’t concerned about any potential privacy issues), there’s still a big roadblock to seeing it come to fruition: Facebook would need to have deep access to the phone’s OS to make this happen.

That isn’t going to happen any time soon on the iPhone, which, as Zuckerberg says, is “hard to penetrate” — without Apple’s cooperation, Facebook won’t be able to do an especially robust integration:

Mark Zuckerberg: For platforms that are really important, but are hard to penetrate, like iPhone, we’ll just do as much as we can. For Android, we can customize it a bit more. Other folks are going to want to work with us on specific things. But, our goal is not to build a phone that competes with the iPhone or anything like that.

And Facebook isn’t about to build its own operating system from the ground up, because that would be a time and resource-consuming endeavor. Which leaves… Android.

Google’s mobile operating system is famously open-source, which means that other companies like Facebook are free to tweak it to their heart’s content, revamping the UI or even adding a new social layer, while leaving the nuts and bolts that make the phone tick in place. Mucking with Android code could preclude Facebook from being able to include some of Google’s Android applications, like Gmail and Android Market — Google has tighter restrictions on who can bundle these apps — but that may not be a dealbreaker for the social network, especially if it’s looking to make the phone a Facebook-centric experience.

Rumors of Facebook working on a custom Android build were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, after our original story describing Facebook’s mobile ambitions first came out over the weekend. And during our interview Zuckerberg essentially confirmed that Facebook was at least experimenting with Android:

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we’ll build our own operating system or something, but who knows. That is more history than we’ve had so far with the company, so it is really hard to predict that far out. But for now, I think, everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system. Jason Kincaid: So, it sounds like a customized version of Android seems like the best thing, the deepest integration you could do without building your own operating system. Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, and I mean… Michael Arrington: Is that putting words in your mouth? Mark Zuckerberg: No, I mean, we’ve looked a bunch of different technical things. I know if we were going to build an operating system, then we wouldn’t have anything to talk about for 4 years. And I know we didn’t start 4 years ago, so I know we’re nowhere near anything on that. What I can say generally is that our goal is not to build an operating system from scratch, or else not to design hardware from scratch. Our goal is to make it so that we can design the best integrations in the widest variety of phones.

And to add even more fuel to the fire: as I wrote this, Bloomberg published a report stating that “Facebook Inc. is working with mobile-handset manufacturer INQ Mobile Ltd. on two smartphones that may be carried by AT&T Inc.,” which are “slated to run Google Inc.’s Android operating system”.

Mark Zuckerberg Donates $100 Million to Newark Public Schools

Mark Zuckerberg is donating $100 million to the Newark public school system. The donation will be the first part of a foundation intended improve U.S. education.

Zuckerberg will announce the contribution Friday on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he will be joined by Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/education/23newark.html?_r=1" >The New York Times broke news of Zuckerberg’s educational fund shortly before href="http://blogs.forbes.com/stevenbertoni/2010/09/22/facebooks-zuckerberg-now-richer-than-apples-steve-jobs/" >Forbes revealed that the Facebook founder and CEO had climbed to the thirty-fifth position on its annual list of wealthy Americans. Forbes estimates that Zuckerberg is now worth $6.9 billion, putting him seven spots above Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is estimated to be worth $6.1 billion, ranking 42 on Forbes’ list.

Some will call the donation calculated. The timing of the announcement is in sync with the October 1 release of href="http://mashable.com/tag/the-social-network/">The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, neither of which protrays Zuckerberg in the most favorable manner. The donation could also be aimed at counteracting any negative stigma that could arise from his new rank on the Forbes 400.

The fact of the matter is that Mark Zuckerberg just donated $100 million of his own personal wealth to one of the country’s worst school systems. This is the sort of philanthropy that we see from the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates; frankly, it’s amazing to have someone else with the ability to contribute at that level to that field. Ideally, we should be able to take the gesture at face value and not taint it with speculation.

---

/>Reviews: href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336650-Facebook" >Facebook

More About: href="http://mashable.com/tag/bill-gates/">bill gates, href="http://mashable.com/tag/facebook/">facebook, href="http://mashable.com/tag/mark-zuckerberg/">mark zuckerberg, href="http://mashable.com/tag/philanthropy/">philanthropy, href="http://mashable.com/tag/social-good/">social good, href="http://mashable.com/tag/the-social-network/">the social network, href="http://mashable.com/tag/trending/">trending, href="http://mashable.com/tag/warren-buffett/">Warren Buffett

style="margin-top:10px;">For more href="http://mashable.com/social-good/">Social Good coverage:

style="margin-top:0;">
• href="http://twitter.com/" rel="nofollow">Follow Mashable Social Good on Twitter
• href="http://www.facebook.com/mashable" rel="nofollow">Become a Fan on Facebook
• href="http://feeds.mashable.com/mashable/social-good" rel="nofollow">Subscribe to the Social Good channel
• Download our free apps for href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable/id356202138?mt=8" rel="nofollow">iPhone and href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable-for-ipad/id370097986?mt=8" rel="nofollow">iPad

Zuckerberg: Social Is Not A Layer You Add (*Cough* Google *Cough*)

Earlier this afternoon, we posted our most recent interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The talk is full of gems of information, such as Facebook’s thoughts about social phones. But a more general statement Zuckerberg made about socialness is also very interesting. Because he seems to be taking a direct shot at Google.

“Even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer,” Zuckerberg says. “It’s like ‘OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box’,” he continues. “That’s not what social is.“

“You have to design it in from the ground up,” is how Zuckerberg sees it. He cites Zynga and Quora as two companies doing this correctly. “They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you,” he says.

One company he doesn’t mention as doing this correctly is Google. In fact, the entire part about adding social as a layer seems to be a shot at them. Recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt directly state that Google’s forthcoming social strategy will be about adding a social layer to existing products. “Google Me is not a product, it’s a social layer across all products,” Schmidt said at Google’s Zeitgeist event a couple weeks ago.

So it looks like Facebook and Google are going to agree to disagree on the concept of social as a layer versus social as a foundation. So far, clearly, Facebook is winning this argument.

Here’s the key blurb from Zuckerberg in context:

One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies now are undervaluing how important social integration is. Right, so even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer, where it’s like “OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box”. That’s not what social is. Social is. You have to design it in from the ground up. These experiences like what Zynga is doing or what a company like Quora is doing, I think that they have just a really good social integration. They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you. Everyone has a real identity for themselves. And those are fundamental building blocks. Now, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get the mobile environments that you see today to a state where you can build really robust social applications on top of it. So that’s the biggest driving force for us — to try to work with these folks and see how deep we can get on our own to make sure that we can build that plumbing. Our goal is to make it exist.

That last bit seems to imply Facebook’s work on diving deep within Android to make it fundamentally more social. Thanks to the open nature of that platform, Facebook can do that. Too bad Google itself isn’t open.

[photo: flickr/steve damron]

Facebook Wants To Make Everything You Do On Your Phone Social

Moments ago we published the transcript of our extended interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he outlined the company’s mobile plans (it has some really juicy stuff, and we’ll be following up with more analysis). One of the interesting things Zuckerberg discussed was Facebook’s view of an optimal phone experience — one where your phone already knows who you are, and personalizes everything, including your installed apps, based on your interests and your social graph.

Facebook has already tried to do this to some extent on the web with its Instant Personalization feature, but Zuckerberg says that it really isn’t possible (at least, not yet) to personalize the entire web experience without building a browser. He hints that this isn’t the case with mobile — and that Facebook may be able to eventually offer a way to turn your entire phone social.

Here’s the relevant portion of our conversation:

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it’s different in different places. For example, take Instant Personalization. Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience. So you go to some apps, take Rotten Tomatoes, which we just launched last week. If people had to click this blue button to Connect, then some percent of them would, but it would be the minority because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get before you click it.If you had to put up some modal dialog then that would be crazy from a UX perspective. But the fact that they can do that instant integration for the users that want it means that everyone has a good experience as soon as they get there.

On phones we can actually do something better. We can do a single sign-on if we do a good integration with a phone, rather than just doing something where you go to an app and it’s automatically social or having to sign into each app individually. Those are the two options on the web. Why not for mobile? Just make it so that you log into your phone once, and then everything that you do on your phone is social.

Michael Arrington: You’re turning on a layer…

Mark Zuckerberg: That’s what we’re trying to do. The reason I just gave that example is that some things, like the implementation is different on mobile.

It’s different on mobile than it would be on the web simply because it is not really possible. I guess maybe Google or Microsoft could have you log into the browser, but we can’t because we don’t build a browser – but, that is the basic strategy.

Zynga CTO On Moving Mountains Of Data (TCTV)

There’s no question that Zynga’s latest data numbers are impressive, with the company moving mountains of data per day, or  roughly one petabyte per day. As Zynga’s CTO Cadir Lee explained at this morning’s Oracle Openworld keynote,  the company is adding as many as 1,000 servers each week to satisfy its growing user base (10% of the internet has now played a Zynga game) and increasing connectivity (there are 3 billion connections between its users).

After the presentation, we got a chance to connect with Lee on TechCrunch TV to get some more color on those numbers.

Although Lee kept many stats (such as the number of total servers) close to his chest, he did shed some interesting light on data usage. According to Lee, there’s actually not significant variability in usage patterns around the globe. Although there are occasional spikes, overall, data usage tends to remain fairly consistent. “Users across the whole world play in fairly consistent patterns and it takes something momentous to change that. There are only a few things that have done it, the World Cup is one of these things actually… we would see these Ws in our graphs, where the first half of the World Cup there would be a dip, and then people would come back at halftime, and then the second half of the World Cup there would be a dip, and if there was overtime there would be another dip at the end. But it really takes something that big in order to change how the traffic moves.”

I also asked him about the latest changes to Facebook games and how that will affect Zynga. On Tuesday evening, Facebook announced that users’ game stories and notifications will be targeted at friends who are also playing the same game. Friends who are not users of that game will receive abstract “discovery stories.” The Facebook news feed has been a critical recruitment tool for Zynga, so any change here could affect the number of new sign-ups. For now, the diplomatic Lee is staying on the fence, but he seemed to be somewhat concerned that the changes could affect discoverability: “Well I still don’t know how it’s going to turn out, we’re obviously going to be watching that closely in the next days and weeks. In concept we really like the idea that people can interact with the people they want to interact with. And we actually really like the concept of narrowcasting which says that you’re sharing really with your friends who are in the same experiences as you but with that said, one of the great things about Facebook is the ability to discover new things, so we’ll have to see how it turns out.”

See full video above.

My apologies for the camera quality, it was shot in a crowded conference hall with my Flip cam.

Next Page »