FAZ.net has one of the most interesting interviews I’ve seen with Mark Zuckerberg thus far.  Holger Schmidt asked some of the most relevant questions such as what Zuckerberg thinks about StudiVZ, his relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, Windows Live Search integration, revenue vs. growth, and about the recent exodus from the company.  One of the last interview questions was “Who is the boss?”  Zuckerberg replied, “Me!”

FAZ asked Zuckerberg what is Facebook’s primary focus?  Zuckerberg stated that the primary focus is growth and revenue is the second priority.  FAZ asked Zuckberg whether Live Search integration will increase their revenue?  Facebook doesn’t work much with search ads as of right now.  FAZ asked about whether Facebook is still pursuing the lawsuit against Facebook clone, StudiVZ.  Zuckberg replied that the lawsuit is going on and that these things move slowly.

Several executives such as Matt Cohl, Dustin Moskovitz, Ben Ling, Adam D’Angelo, and Owen Van Natta have left Facebook recently.  Zuckerberg said that they left because they had planned exits.  Cohl had always wanted to be a VC, Dustin had passion for enterprise, etc.

And lastly, FAZ asked Zuckerberg why he was allowing employees to sell shares worth up to $900,000.  Since Facebook isn’t planning an acquisition or IPO anytime soon, they wanted employees to not have to worry about these type of things.  Zuckerberg also pointed out that he was able to get $900,000 of liquidity in the early days of Facebook and that was a big deal to him.

Facebook has an interesting future ahead.  Facebook has over 100 million users that upload millions of pictures everyday.  Facebook is the number one photo site in the world right now.  Facebook is to photos as YouTube is to videos. 

If Facebook finds a way to monetize their photo archives, then there will be a major increase in revenue.  Facebook should make some sort of advertising arrangement with photo recognition sites, Like.com or Idee.

[Dustin Moskowitz, image credit: ValleyWag]

Dustin Moskowitz must have woken up one day with an epiphany.  Is there more to life than being one of the co-founders of the world’s second biggest social network?  Apparently this is the case because Dustin Moskowitz and Justin Rosenstein are stepping down to create a new venture.  Moskowitz was Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate during the days of TheFacebook.com’s inception at Harvard University.

Facebook has been around for five years, employs over five hundred employees, built an application platform, removed “the” from the company name, and gained a valuation of several billions of dollars since Dustin joined.  Rumor has it that Dustin plans on creating an enterprise social network platform. 

Zuckerberg will continue to turn to Dustin for advice in the future. 

“Whether I work here or not, I’ll forever bleed Facebook blue. Facebook has been my passion and my purpose for the past 5 years. Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook’s product and purpose,” stated Moskowitz in a company e-mail.  “Similarly, my timing in leaving is not an indication that I have lost faith in our ability to succeed, but an affirmation in my confidence in the company’s enduring success irrespective of changing faces.”

More on this as Dustin announces his new start-up endeavour.

[image: Ted Ullyot, credit: ValleyWag]

Facebook recently had a shift in their management.  The social networking company hired Ted Ullyot as their new General Counsell.  Ullyot was a former partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis.  Ullyot will be moving near the company’s headquarters from Washington D.C. next month.  Ullyot plans on building the Facebook legal team to more than the current 10 members.  Ullyot believes that some of the biggest issues to take on at Facebook includes I.P., international expansion, and contracts.

Ullyot joins Facebook with a controversial past.  Ullyot helped coordinate the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity.  Plame was a CIA agent whose missions were supposed to be classified.  Ullyot also represented former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as his chief of staff.  Gonzales excused President George Bush from jury duty in a lawsuit involving drunk driving in Travis County around 1996.  The President himself was charged with drunk driving in 1976.  During Gonzales term in Texas as Governor Bush’s Counsel, the state oversaw more executed prisoners than any other state [Wikipedia].  Gonzales was sworn in as the U.S. Attorney General in 2005, but resigned due to several controversies around the U.S. Patriot Act in 2007.

Ullyot is the former SVP and General Counsel for AOL Time Warner Europe.  Ullyot also had a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit [Time Warner]. 

[image: Rudy Gadre, credit: Facebook]

Facebook’s former General Counsel Rudy Gadre was replaced by Ullyot at the social networking company.  In a press release sent to Pulse 2.0, it appears that Gadre has found a new calling as the VP of Business Ops. at Evri.  Gadre spent two years as Facebook’s General Counsel and helped the company deal with such issues as the lawsuit with ConnectU.  Gadre will oversee the legal and I.P., HR, and financial decisions at Evri. 

“Rudy brings a great deal of business insight and legal expertise from his experience at Facebook and Amazon,” stated Neil Roseman, CEO of Evri. “I’m extremely pleased to have Rudy join the Evri team; he will be a real asset to the team as we endeavor to change the way consumers discover and engage with content on the Web.”

Gadre has also worked at Beacon Law Advisors, Amazon.com, and Perkins Coie, LLP.  Evri is backed with $8 million in Series A from Vulcan Capital. 

Divya Narendra started ConnectU with Beijing Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.  ConnectU started the idea behind Facebook.  Facebook is now run by billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg.  Zuckerberg’s wealth is pegged at about $1.5 billion through Facebook according to Forbes.  ConnectU sued Facebook for stealing the idea and used some of their source code.  Facebook and ConnectU settled out of court, but through the agreement, it was discovered that Facebook was not internally valuating themselves at the $15 billion that Microsoft pegged them at. 

Divya currently works at SumZero LLC where he serves as the Co-founder and CEO.  Aalap Mahadevia is the other co-founder in SumZero.  Below is a screenshot available via ValleyWag:

Some of the people that wrote on Divya’s wall includes Lindsey Hess, who wrote, “Divya!! I cannot believe you are on facebook.”  And Andrew Davis wrote “Um, was this part of a legal agreement or something? Never thought I’d see the day…”  Divya left ConnectU off the places of his Education and Work. 

Several researchers at the University of Georgia have analyzed the profile of Facebook users.  It turns out that there is a correlation between having a lot of friends and having a high feeling of self-importance.  This includes the number of wall posts and photos you are tagged in as well.  The study was published by Laura Buffardi and W. Keith Campbell. 

The Facebook researchers took the profiles of 130 users and asked strangers to judge whether those users were narcissistic or not.  And it turns out that the more narcissistic someone is, the less long-term relationships they will have.  “Narcissists might initially be seen as charming,
but they end up using people for their own advantage,” stated Campbell.  “They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run.”

Personally I think that the study conducted by Buffardi and Campbell is narcissistic.  Who do they think they are?  What authority do they have to judge people that have a good number of friends, wall posts, and photos on Facebook?  Narcissistic is not a word that you throw around to call people that want to help market or promote themselves.  What’s the next study, Buffardi and Campbell?  Anyone that has a result on Google for their name is narcissistic too?

[image credit: Owen Byrne]

Facebook Connect is getting closer to fully rolling out with all of their partners which includes CBS, ABC, Hulu, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, Xobni, etc.  Pretty soon anyone with a Facebook account will be able to log into Digg using Facebook Connect.  Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg stated that this is “the next step of collaborative filtering.”

All 100 million of Facebook users will be able to log in to Digg using their regular Facebook username and password.  With an increase is the number of Digg users, the social bookmarking platform wants to be able to cater to your interests.

It is the next step of collaborative filtering. It is the idea that instead of looking at a social network that you’ve created yourself, that you’ve entered in the names, I am going to look at all of you, everyone, and I’m going to compare you all together. I am going to find people like you and I am going to use that collective wisdom to find things that are more specifically interesting to you [TechCrunch].

Buzz words aside, I believe collaborative filtering is a way of saying that when you log into Digg through Facebook Connect, you’ll be able to find out what your Facebook friends are Digging.  So let’s say that I’m Facebook friends with Joe Schmoe and he Diggs an article about the “Top 10 Best Ways to Collaboratively Filter Something.”  Since Joe Schmoe and I are both logged into Digg through Facebook Connect, I will probably find out that he either Dugg or submitted that article.  That is how I envision collaborative filtering.

Vodafone Group Plc (NYSE:VOD) is currently in the Beta testing phase of a new Facebook application that they are calling Vodafone Connect to Friends.  This application enables Facebook members to send text messages and pictures to mobile phones.  The application currently only works for those in the U.K.  Below is a screenshot of the application:

Sending a text message takes up 1 credit and a photo MMS takes up 3 credits.  Credits expire after 30 days.  Below are the prices of the Vodafone credits:

The application does not connect profile pages so if you want to install the application and monitor your credits, it is best to bookmark the site.  What I would like to see is American telecomm companies embracing social media.  I’m sure Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T can create something fancy around Facebook.

[Photo credit: Wikipedia]

Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook has about 100 million users that are using the new design of the social network.  While many people are moaning and groaning about the changes since they are so used to the old version, Zuckerberg wrote a reflective blog post. 

“We realize that change can be difficult though,” wrote Zuckerberg.  “Many people disliked News Feed at first because it changed their home page and how they shared information. Now it’s one of the most important parts of Facebook. We think the new design can have the same effect.”

Facebook has a featured called Pages.  This is where people can become fans of certain topics whether it is the new Facebook design, Michael Phelps, or Pulse 2.0.  About 150,000 people participated on the new Facebook design page.  When Facebook rolled out the design to 40 million users, 30 million people stuck with the new design and the other 10 million switched back to the old one.  Majority rules, sorry 10 million users.

While Facebook considered supporting the old and the new designs, it just isn’t feasible.  The company wouldn’t be able to keep up with updating features in both the old and the new design and have to build around two different platforms. 

Several researchers have built an application on Facebook called “Photo of the Day” to exploit security vulnerabilities. The application, which seemed harmless showed a large picture from National Geographic everyday, but every time the application was clicked, a 600 kilobyte HTTP requested an image from a victim’s website.

The application user does not realize that every time they clicked the application, they are contributing to a denial-of-service attack on a website. The application was added about 9 months ago and about 1,000 Facebook users installed it. The researchers monitored how much incoming traffic was sent to the fictitious victim website. If a few million users added the application, it would send about 248 gigabytes of unwanted traffic to a victim’s website.

“We used our FaceBot to carry out a complete evaluation of our proof-of-concept attack via real-world experiments,” stated the researchers in their paper. “Extrapolating from these measurements along with popularity metrics of current Facebook applications, we show that owners of popular Facebook applications have a highly distributed platform with significant attack firepower under their control.”

Applications also have the ability to access the personal details of users on Facebook and store them on remote servers. One way to prevent this from happening is to have applications lack the ability to interact with host websites that are not part of the social network. Every new application should be scrutinized intensely by Facebook too.

The study was conducted by the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore along with Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece. The application is still live so far.