Yesterday was a big day, PR-wise, for Mark Zuckerberg and Carol Bartz. Zuck used the austere pages of the Washington Post to soothe concerns about Facebook’s will to invade privacy, while Bartz showed up on stage at a TechCrunch conference to defend Yahoo against one of its loudest critics, TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington. Both CEOs displayed their usual communication approaches–hers a defensive and blowsy vulgarity and his near-fatal boredom.
What follows is an imaginary conversation based on actual quotes from a video account and the op-ed.
Mark Zuckerberg: Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas.
Carol Bartz: There’s no single strategy at Yahoo.
Zuckerberg: People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.
Bartz: Yahoo is a company that is very, very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one…. People come to check the things they like. You can just get it together… Yahoo is one site people always stop at.
Zuckerberg: Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years.
Bartz: If that’s all you’ve got, you better quit now.
Zuckerberg: The challenge is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone.
Bartz: It’s a great trick to have. I’d like that trick too, along with the social graph.
Zuckerberg: It’s a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.
Bartz: You guys are bad.
Zuckerberg: The challenge is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone. These are issues we think about all the time. Whenever we make a change, we try to apply the lessons we’ve learned along the way. The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information.
Bartz: I was trying to decide if I should fly to Europe with the volcano cloud. I checked in with the Yahoo front page and there was an AP report that was 17 hours old. What the hell am I going to do with 17-hour-old volcano information? I need real-time Twitter-like feeds.
Zuckerberg: Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.
Bartz: Is that wrong?
Zuckerberg: We have heard the feedback.
Bartz: We put up commenting over the last few months. We have a million comments a day now. We had 85,000 comments on day one at Yahoo News.
Zuckerberg: There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you’ll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we’ll be eager to get your feedback.
Bartz: By the way, I’ve never had a bong in my life if that means anything to you.
Zuckerberg: We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want.
Bartz: Is that appropriate?
Zuckerberg: I’d like to clear that up now. Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger.
Bartz: We have 32,000 variations on our front page module. We serve a million of those a day. It’s all customized. Our click-through rate went up twice since we started customizing this.
Zuckerberg: Here are the principles under which Facebook operates: You have control over how your information is shared.
Bartz: I don’t know if anybody owns anything anymore… I would love to own it. Shit. Why not?
Zuckerberg: We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.
Bartz: We’re on 37 million of the 82 million mobile devices in the US. We have half the US market. People don’t think that’s true, but it is.
Zuckerberg: We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
Bartz: We serve 10 billion ads a day, keeping up our whole advertising business is a huge technical effort.
Zuckerberg: We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
Bartz: Because you’re odd.
Zuckerberg: We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.
Bartz: I’d love to be Queen Poobah of the world — but I’m not.
Zuckerberg: Facebook has evolved from a simple dorm-room project to a global social network connecting millions of people.
Bartz: I’ve been at this company 16 months. I’m supposed to have an iPad and iPod. It probably takes a long time to convince yourself what to do. I don’t want to hear any crap about something magical the fine people of Yahoo are supposed to do in this time. So fuck off.
Zuckerberg: We will keep building, we will keep listening and we will continue to have a dialogue with everyone who cares enough about Facebook to share their ideas.
Bartz: We are way over. End on a high.
Zuckerberg: And we will keep focused on achieving our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected.
Bartz: Who did that laugh?
