Alex French, writer for GQ: How’s things?
Mark Zuckerberg, social cartographer and boy CEO: There’s this definite evolution happening. Where the first part of the social web was mapping out the social graph. And the second phase is now mapping out the stream of everything that everyone does. All of human consciousness and communication.
Alex: Imagine if you could broadcast people’s emotions into a feed?
Zuck: I think we’ll get there.
Alex: So how are you going to map all of human consciousness and communication?
Zuck: We don’t map it directly. We give people tools so they can share as much as they want, but increasingly people share more and more things, and there’s this trend toward sharing a greater number of smaller things like status updates, wall posts, mobile photos, etc. A status update can approach being a projection of an emotion.
Alex: That’s what I use it for.
Zuck: So it’s not so crazy to say that in a few years people will be doing a lot more of that. It takes time for people to be comfortable sharing more and for the social norms to change.
***
There’s some scoffing going around at Zuckerberg’s megalomaniac projection that Facebook (or other social tools) will become conduits for actual, realtime emotions. These naysayers are the idiots. Zuckerberg definitely overshot with Beacon, but he’s predicting a certainty here: as long as society continues to support widespread access to digital devices, we will live, learn, and love through online social circuitry.
The real challenge for Zuckerberg is maintaining Facebook’s monopoly on the social machinery market while the concept of digital living continues to develop. Critical mass is Facebook’s strongest advantage and that’s going nowhere fast… but we’ll see how it turns out.
(Conversation taken from GQ’s “Boy Genius of the Year: Do You Trust This Face?” via Scott.)