*only when users demand it.
Day 1 of the TechCrunch 40 ended on an interesting note, with a “fireside chat” between Michael Arrington and Mark Zuckerberg. I was impressed with how smooth Mark came across, and how well he had prepped for the encounter. Mark continued to use the word “open” wherever possible to refer to Facebook’s strategy of creating a proprietary OS for the social web, and used the event to announce “FB Fund,” a way to offer up grants to encourage developers to focus on FBML rather than HTML and to increase their lock-in. Sounded a lot like Microsoft of the ’90’s…
Here are some pictures from the day, including the Zuckerberg session (and one of Tantek asking the closing question about whether/when Facebook would support open standards, such as OpenID and microformats)…
The Real McCrea 