Facebook founder rolls out changes to profile pages
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled changes to member profile
pages on Sunday and said the movie “The Social Network” got “hugely
basic” things wrong about the origins of the site.
Zuckerberg, in an interview with the CBS show “60 Minutes, said he
turned down an opportunity to sell Facebook to Yahoo! for one billion
dollars four years ago and made it clear he is in no hurry to take the
company public.
Mark Zuckerberg |
The 26-year-old Facebook chief executive also defended his approach
to the privacy of the social network’s more than 500 million users,
saying “we never sell your information.” “Advertisers who are using the
site never get access to your information,” he said. “It’s against all
of our policies for an application to ever share information with
advertisers.
“Now, do we get it right all the time? No!” he said. “But it’s
something that we take really seriously.” The new profile pages
highlight recent pictures in which a member has been “tagged” in a bar
at the top of the page along with biographical information such as where
a member is from, where they went to school, their relationship status
and where they work.
“People love photos,” Zuckerberg said. “Photos originally weren’t
that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people
really like them, so we built out this functionality.” The new profile
pages should be available to all of Facebook’s users by early next year,
Josh Wiseman, a Facebook engineer, said in a blog post.
Facebook members can highlight their most important friends on their
new profile, create new groups of friends or share activities and
interests such as favorite musicians and sports teams.
Speaking of “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg said “we took the whole
company to go see the movie” and “I actually thought it was pretty fun.
“It’s pretty interesting to see what parts they got right and what
parts they got wrong,” he said. “I think that they got every single
T-shirt that they had the Mark Zuckerberg character wearing right. And
they got sandals right and all that.
“But I mean, there are hugely basic things that they got wrong, too,”
he said. “They made it seem like my whole motivation for building
Facebook was so I could get girls.” “60 Minutes” also featured an
interview the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Harvard University
classmates who accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea.
The twins reached a reported 65-million-dollar settlement with
Facebook but are now claiming they were misled about the value of the
company.
“He sabotaged our project; and he betrayed us,” Tyler Winklevoss
said.
Speaking of the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg said “it’s hard for me
to fully wrap my head around where they’re coming from on this.
“You know, early on, they had an idea that was completely separate
from Facebook,” he said. “It was a dating site for Harvard. And I agreed
to help them out with it.
“It wasn’t a job, they weren’t paying me, I wasn’t hired by them or
anything like that,” he said. “That they would be upset about this all
these years later is kind of mindboggling for me.” He said the movie
makes “it seem like this whole lawsuit is such a huge part of Facebook’s
history” but “I’ve probably spent less than two weeks of my time worried
about this lawsuit at all.” Asked if he felt any remorse, Zuckerberg
said, “I mean, after all this time, I feel bad that they still feel bad
about it.” Zuckerberg said he was offered a billion dollars for Facebook
in 2006 by Yahoo! but turned it down.
“I think a lot of people at the time thought we should sell the
company,” he said. “But you know, I felt really strongly. I think, like,
now, people generally think that that was a good decision.” Asked if
there would be an initial public offering, Zuckerberg said: “Maybe.” “A
lot of people who I think build startups or companies think that selling
the company or going public is this endpoint... like you win when you go
public. And that’s just not how I see it,” he said.
AFP |