14 DAY TRIAL // Not to be sexist or anything, but women who aren't on point with their questions utterly mess up as interviewers on stage. Add to that the fact that the interviewee was the notoriously mute Mark Zuckerberg and you get the whole picture of what happened in Ballroom A of the Austin Convention Center at SXSW. While trying to be friendly and pitching life-lines to the Facebook founder and CEO which he could grab hold and start talking, Sarah Lacy managed to be reduced to the position of a moderator in her own interview, with people from the audience taking over the question-asking stage after a copious round of heckling.
What was supposed to be an hour-long one-on-one discussion, as per usual with Lacy's interviews, turned into a train wreck, as Jason Pontin twittered. The various approaches to interesting subjects that she attempted were finally put to a halt by Zuckerberg himself, when, after hearing a story about his ways of working, nonchalantly told her that she needs to ask a question for him to respond. Awkward with capital letters.
After turning the mike to the audience, the questions and answers started pouring in, about privacy and data portability, the way the flood of information diminishes the Facebook experience altogether and so on. That was closer to the "say as little as possible, and nothing more than asked" style of approach that Zuckerberg was used to, and the impression that he is in fact "an android from the future still learning the nuances of human conversation," as Valleywag's Nicholas Carlson said, floated back. Too bad for Lacy, from what I could gather, she did her best.
Facebook's CEO admitted for the first time, however, that Yahoo! bid for his company $1 billion, a figure never confirmed before. How's that for starters?