Facebook Interviewer Heckled at Web Conference

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.

Comments

It's a difficult balance

[BadAnalogyGuy]

On the one hand, you want to be able to post pictures of yourself passed out in your own vomit, stripped down to your panties and french kissing another sorority sister, and simulating fellatio on a blow up doll. On the other hand, you don't want people to be able to copy the pictures and send them around the web.

I think the right word to describe this is FAIL

You can't have your urinal cake and eat it too.

Re:It's a difficult balance

[Hatta]

Assuming you're unable or unwilling to disable the ads isn't it better to be looking at TARGETTED ads rather than random ones?

No, marketing is supposed to make you spend money you wouldn't have otherwise spent. If not that, then it's supposed to make you spend money on an option you wouldn't have otherwise chosen. It does this through emotional manipulation, rather than presenting facts and arguing them well, so the better marketed option is usually not the best one.

So ads that are targeted towards me are likely to induce me to spend money I would not have otherwise, and they're likely to make me choose a less optimal option by manipulating my emotions. Random ads are less likely to affect my behavior, so I find them more acceptable. There's really *nothing* good that can come from exposure to marketing.

Re:It's a difficult balance

[PFI_Optix]

And no matter how hard a webmaster tries, it's impossible to prevent someone from getting pictures off a site. You can prevent "Save as", you can even do things like set the displayed image as a table background with a transparent picture over it, but you can't keep them from taking a simple screen cap and cropping it. Even if you could, it's always possible to point a good camera at a good monitor and get a near-perfect reproduction.

If you don't want specific pictures of yourself being available to everyone, don't make them available to anyone. No matter how "secure" you make it, the internet makes it possible for just one person with the time and know-how to circumvent security and share the content (or the method of circumvention itself) with the rest of the world. Tangent: The same can be applied to copy protection schemes...it just takes one person to render them useless at preventing all but casual "hey can you copy that disk for me?" piracy.

Re:It's a difficult balance

[Briden]

Marketing is supposed to make you spend money you wouldn't have otherwise spent?

No, marketings purpose is simply to get you to buy a given product. Whether or not you'd have bought that product or a similar one is irrelevant, the purpose is to increase the chance that you buy that particular one, contributing to the revenue of that company who is producing the widget.

Some advertisements use emotional manipulation. Some are informational, aesthetic, logical, or price based. It's a big competitive soup of screaming focussed on getting one thing, YOUR dollar.

I have a few dollars, some expendable, and I am willing to part with them for the right thing, stuff I would have bought anyway, as well as new and innovative products that I gotta have. For me it's DJ gear and music, for some it's antique art.

Personally, I mind LESS if the ads are targeted to me. and there is a better chance I might actually buy some of the ads i have "opted in" for. Unlike the mass advertisements, for example, McDonalds, who waste millions on advertising and will never convince me to buy another hamburger, I don't fall for their crass bullshit. 100% Beef my Ass!

Ads are here to stay, they suck for the most part, but they power the finances that drive the web, so we can't get rid of all of them. Click an ad for something you support today!

(and put a bunch of people you don't into your host file) ;)

Too bad...

[Black Parrot]

Too bad the article doesn't tell us what the purportedly clueless interviewer *did* ask.

Re:Too bad...

[Furry Ice]

Here's a video of the interview: http://www.austin360.com/news/mplayer/sxsw/73367

Re:Probably set up

[LordNimon]

That's where journalist integrity comes in. The interviewer is responsible for knowing what questions should be asked. If she isn't allowed to ask those questions, then she should refuse to interview him.

Sha handles it gracefully

[prostoalex]

Say what you want about American journalists, and their courageous representative Sarah Lacy, she handled the hiccups in the interview gracefully:

seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.

Re:Probably set up

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

That's where journalist integrity comes in.

I,... I don't understand. Why do you put those two words so close together?

TWiT and why the Interviewer sucked

[strredwolf]

This is on This Week In Tech #135 in which Robert Scoble reported from South by Southwest (SxSW) about the uproar: Sarah Lacy was playing softball and flirting with Mark Zuckerberg, and the audience as well as Mark was expecting hard though questions. At the right point the audience interrupted, which made Sarah go defensive -- a bad move that made her loose control of the interview.

Jason Calacanis (in the TWiT podcast) then explained that Sarah's been flirting with Mark for a very long time, and these softball questions are very unprofessional of her.

IMO She really needed a wake-up call -- SxSW live isn't print!

Re:Video of Sarah Lacy's version of what happened

[MrMunkey]

Here's a video of the actual interview. I don't think it's the whole thing though.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=LxZ6-O5R1zs