Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg holds his first Q&A session, and reveals why he made 1.3bn people switch to the Messenger app
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has opened up about the controversial Messenger app, how Hollywood has hurt him and why he wears the same T-shirt every day, in his first-ever Q&A session.
The 30-year-old billionaire spent an hour at Facebook's Californian headquarters answering pre-submitted questions from across the world as well as from those who attended the event.
Why has Facebook made everyone download Messenger?
The social network's 1.3bn users were undoubtedly keen to hear Mr Zuckerberg's reasons for forcing them to download a separate app for Messenger, after the chat function was disabled on the main site.
Why has Facebook made everyone download Messenger?
The social network's 1.3bn users were undoubtedly keen to hear Mr Zuckerberg's reasons for forcing them to download a separate app for Messenger, after the chat function was disabled on the main site.
Mr Zuckerberg admitted that he didn't get the transition right but insisted that mobile phone users, who send 10bn messages a day, would benefit from the move.
"On mobile, each app really can focus on doing one thing well, we think," he said.
"You're probably messaging people 15, 20 times a day, and having to go into an app and wait for it to load and then go through a bunch of steps to get to your messages or send a message is a lot of friction.
"Maybe we didn’t handle that as smoothly as we could, in terms of the transition."
I want to make Facebook as vital as electricity
This attempt to make the website quicker and easier to use is at the heart of Mr Zuckerberg's vision of where the company will be in the future. He admitted that he wants to make Facebook as vital as electricity.
"The services that we aspire to be like in the world are kind of these basic things that you rely on," Mr Zuckerberg said.
"My goal was never really to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person, and I've never really tried to be cool. Our model for Facebook has never been to try to make it particularly exciting to use - we just want to make it useful."
The Social Network was hurtful
Facebook took a large leap into the mainstream in 2010, when a Hollywood film depicted how Mr Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, created the social network while studying at Harvard.
The Social Network suggested Mr Zuckerberg only created Facebook to attract women following a break-up. The tech tycoon admitted the film makers had "made up" a lot of the events in the film and this had hurt him.
"I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that movie in a while. I kind of blocked that one out," he said.
"I think the reality is that writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about, so you can imagine that a lot of this stuff they had to embellish or make up.
"They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot... they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.
"[I met] the guy who played me in the movie [Eisenberg]. I tried to be nice."
A key part of the film he pointed to as being factually incorrect was the suggestion he was single while creating Facebook. Mr Zuckerberg said he had been dating his now-wife, Priscilla Chan, at the time.
"There were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard to take seriously," he said.
Does Mark Zuckerberg wear the same T-shirt every day?
One aspect the film makers did get right was Mr Zuckerberg's wardrobe, including the famous grey T-shirt that he reportedly wears every day.
Mr Zuckerberg said he owns multiple versions of the same T-shirt, as clothing, along with breakfast, is a "silly" decision he doesn't want to spend too long making. He is also too busy looking after the world's largest social network.
"I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.
"I'm in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than 1bn people, and I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life, so that way I can dedicate all of my energy towards just building the best products and services."
Most of Facebook will be videos by 2020
Those products and services and what Facebook's users have done with them have evolved substantially since the service was founded in 2004.
In the early days, most users updated the site with short messages, but that trend is changing towards video, according to Mr Zuckerberg, and the site is changing with it.
"Five years ago most of Facebook was text, and if you fast-forward five years, probably most of it is going to be video, just because it's getting easier to capture video and the moments of your life and share it," he said.
“Our goal is to build the perfect personalised newspaper for every person in the world. We’re trying to personalise it and show you the stuff that’s going to be most interesting to you.”
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