On the day Facebook launched its new software for Android, Facebook Home, Wired scored an interview with Mark Zuckerberg in order to chat about the product and what the future holds. Here are some choice cuts from the Big Blue’s head honcho.
On the motivations behind Home:
Facebook accounts for 23 per cent of the time people spend on smartphones. The next-biggest ones are Instagram and Google Maps, which are each at 3 per cent. For the past 18 months, we spent our efforts building good versions of Facebook’s mobile apps. But the design was still very close to what we have on the desktop. We knew that we could do better.
On not building a phone from scratch:
We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones-apart from the iPhone-can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 per cent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.
On whether Home will make it to iPhone:
That’s above my pay grade to be able to answer that… Look, I would love for that answer to be yes. We are trying to build a community. We have a billion folks using our services now, and we want to get to 3 or 5 billion one day. We’re going to do that by building the best experience across all devices… Of course, a lot of people also love iPhones-I love mine, and I would like to be able to deliver Facebook Home there as well.
On the future of sharing:
We talk about [a] Moore’s law of sharing, but we never meant that all this will happen on Facebook-it will happen in the world. Our challenge is to make that happen on Facebook… Three years from now, people are going to be sharing eight to 10 times as much stuff. We’d better be there, because if we’re not, some other service will be.
On life outside Facebook:
I teach a middle school class over in East Menlo Park… It’s on how to build a business. Every Tuesday we go over one skill, and each group has a side project. When the class ends, they’ll come to Facebook and sell the products they’ve made, like they’re marketing them.
There is, of course, plenty more where that came from over on Wired. Go read the whole thing. [Wired]