Mark Zuckerberg did his first online Q&A

Nov 7, 2014 08:42 GMT  ·  By

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would be doing a live Q&A with the online community, much like he does within the company, trying to answer questions coming from employees. Just a few hours ago, the Facebook co-founder stepped forward and did as promised, answering some of the most popular questions asked in the past week on the event page.

Zuckerberg wasn’t alone in his endeavor, but had a lot of execs on his side, ready to take over whenever there was a question he didn’t know the answer to. The list includes Sheryl Sandberg, but the management team was quite extensive.

One big question that many have been wondering is why the company forced people to install Facebook Messenger. Zuckerberg’s answer was prompt and direct and it actually made sense when he explained it to the audience, both in the room and online.

“The first thing I want to do is acknowledge that asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask, and I appreciate that that required work, and it was a bunch of friction. We really believe that this is a better experience and the messaging is really important. On mobile, each app can focus on doing one thing well,” he said.

He went on to explain that, on Facebook, the main purpose was to look at news and the content friends are sharing. Sending messages on Facebook was increasingly popular, with some 10 billion messages each day, which makes creating Messenger make sense. By separating the apps, they both received a performance boost.

This actually falls in line with the general trend in the tech community where they’re looking to simplify things. Google, for instance, is forcing Chrome developers to split their apps into several tools, each performing a single job.

The disappearing news feed

Zuckerberg was also asked what his favorite feature that had been developed, but not released, was. The Facebook CEO went back a year and gave the example of the news feed. Some people thought that it looked outdated, so they started working on a new version, testing it out on a few select users.

The issue, it seemed, was that the new design was meant for bigger screens, whilst the average user generally has smaller screens. Since people started seeing a single post on their displays, the new version was obviously not a success for everyone, and the company decided to roll back the changes and just leave it be.

Zuckerberg was also asked whether Facebook intended to take over the mobile industry. He explained that there were 4.5 billion people in the world with no connection to the Internet, which makes the company feel a social responsibility to spread the Internet, especially through Internet.org, where it works with other companies.