marks

On this slow Monday morning, the boys talk about how SXSW is meh, Sched.org looks ugly, Twitter still sucks, plus...Army of Two isn't good...but at least The Bourne Conspiracy looks surprisingly good. It's kind of a downer show, but you can always fix that by going to the forums and voting for your favorite Photoshop entry to win your copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl!

Listen now: Download today's podcast

AUSTIN, Texas--If journalist Sarah Lacy got some people riled up with the style of her keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday, her Twitter response to criticism of her will not help calm things down.

As reported here and elsewhere earlier Sunday, Lacy interviewed Zuckerberg as the day's keynote at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and in the process, saw the audience of thousands turn against her for a series of stylistic faux-pas.

I won't rehash all the details here, since you can read up on that in my previous story.

But as pointed out later … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Ugh. Talk about losing an audience.

During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address Sunday here at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), on-stage interviewer Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed, becoming much more of the story than she should have been and having the capacity crowd turn on her over the course of the hour discussion.

"Other than rough interviews," an audience member asked Zuckerberg during a short Q&A session at the end of the keynote, "what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?"

"Has this been a rough interview?" Lacy asked … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--The biggest ballroom at the Austin Convention Center was packed full with an eager audience well over half an hour before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, recently pegged by Forbes magazine as the world's youngest billionaire, was set to take the stage for his keynote at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Sunday. There were even two "spillover rooms" for a simulcast of the keynote, where the young CEO was going to be interviewed by BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy.

In case you didn't know already, Zuckerberg is a pretty big deal in the tech sphere. … Read more

q&a On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had hired six-year Google veteran Sheryl Sandberg as its chief operating officer, a big move as the hot social network attempts to convince the Valley that it's here to stay and slated to keep growing fast.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had a few minutes to chat on the phone about Sandberg's new role at the company.

The 23-year-old CEO insisted that Sandberg isn't a pure replacement for outgoing executive Owen Van Natta. From what it sounds like, her role will be significantly more extensive. Not surprisingly, she's … Read more

The crew at Facebook has done well to amass a huge war chest (Microsoft's $240 million investment), 66 million members, 200,000 developers, 16,000 applications, 500 employees and somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in revenue for last year.

With the appointment of Sheryl Sandberg as COO, the odds just increased for Facebook to survive its adolescence (more on Techmeme).

Sandberg is 15 years senior to Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. She has been through the gauntlet, working in the Clinton administration and then at Google for six years, starting when the company had less than … Read more

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has hired a new chief operating officer to replace the outgoing Owen Van Natta. Starting on March 24, veteran Google employee Sheryl Sandberg will take on the executive role at the social network.

For six years, Sandberg was vice president of global sales and operations at Google, where she helped to grow the company's AdWords and AdSense products, as well as its Google.org nonprofit division.

As part of her new job, according to a statement from the social-networking company, she will "be responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand … Read more

MIAMI--When the Future of Web Apps conference wound down Friday night, a few things were clear, not the least of which is the fact that open standards are a big deal.

Google engineer Kevin Marks gave a talk at FOWA about application program interfaces (APIs) and Google's role in the developer community. Marks, a veteran of blog search start-up Technorati, now works on the search giant's OpenSocial initiative, which is working toward a universal standard for social-networking standards and is slated to launch on MySpace.com and Hi5 as well as Google's own Orkut soon. He also … Read more

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started … Read more