The Social

Yelp Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman

(Credit: Yelp)

NEW YORK--"They have that saying, 'don't shoot the messenger,' but the reason they say that is because the messenger gets shot," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me over coffee on Tuesday morning. "So I have to take my shots."

He was talking, of course, about the PR fiasco that ensued when the Emeryville, Calif.-based East Bay Express newspaper published a lengthy expose on the business reviews site, alleging that it strong-armed businesses into paying to remove negative reviews. As a fairly regular Yelp user, I was repulsed by the possibility that its corporate practices were so sketchy. But Stoppelman, visiting from the company's home base of San Francisco, claims there's no truth to the allegations.

"There are business owners out there who don't think consumer reviews are good," said Stoppelman, who called the expose's accusations a "conspiracy theory" and likened them to similar tiffs that have arisen over Google's advertising program. "(They're) looking for confirmation that Yelp is this bad entity."

He wrote last week in a lengthy post on the official Yelp blog that the activity called out as "extortion" and likened to the Mafia in the East Bay Express can be attributed in part to the algorithm that Yelp developed to weed out suspicious reviews.

"When we set out to built Yelp, we said we didn't want to be this anonymous reviews site," Stoppelman said to CNET News on Tuesday. "When you go to Yelp and you search for a business, (because of the algorithm) you're seeing reviews that are reasonably trustworthy." Yelp will, for example, flag reviews that appear to be spam, may be overly positive reviews coming from a business itself or overly negative ones coming from its competitors, or are coming from new users with no track record or profile data.

The fallout wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, Stoppelman explained. Inquiries and complaints in the wake of the East Bay Express story were primarily restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area. His visit to New York was routine and already on the books, rather than a face-saving measure.

Stoppelman also said he didn't think the allegations could be connected to, say, a rogue Yelp employee independently engaged in shady tactics. "This doesn't come up, because we have all these processes in place," he said. "It would be caught in the account manager hand-off."

But he did admit to some error on Yelp's part in not explaining its technologies and practices thoroughly enough--from the review-filtering algorithm to the sponsored-listing offerings.

"We haven't made it obvious enough about what systems are in place for our users, especially business users," he acknowledged. "As these stories have sort of come out, we've been focusing on making sure that the messaging is very, very clear and tight."

Given the Web's gradual shift toward a culture of "transparency," any site with a behind-closed-doors algorithm is going to be eyed with suspicion. The spotlight has fallen on the technology that powers social news site Digg, especially when people learned how to game it. And last spring, Facebook pulled a little-known friend-search feature when tech gossip blogs called it a "stalker list."

And the Yelp algorithm does pull down some legitimate reviews, something that was pointed out in the East Bay Express story and which Stoppelman said will invariably happen given Yelp's system. "We're not going to get it right, and it's not perfect, because you're going to lose some legitimate content as you try to get rid of the spammy content." Reviews that are taken down through the algorithm aren't deleted, he said; they're not displayed on a business' review page but still appear on the reviewer's profile.

Yelp nevertheless welcomes feedback, Stoppelman said. It's possible, for example, to review Yelp on Yelp. Over 1,500 people have reviewed it, and he said he tries to respond to as many of the reviewers as possible.

DANA POINT, Calif.--When political pundit Arianna Huffington, along with a team of digital-media veterans, launched political news aggregator The Huffington Post in 2005, critics were skeptical of the left-leaning site. But it's turned out to be one of political journalism's great recent success stories, even amid controversy over the charismatic and opinionated Huffington and the site's business model, which utilizes thousands of unpaid bloggers in addition to full-time reporters.

Just over a year ago, The Huffington Post hired Betsy Morgan, head of CBSNews.com, to serve as its CEO, taking over from co-founder and former AOL executive Ken Lerer.

Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan

At the WebbyConnect summit this week, where Morgan was a featured speaker, CNET News caught up with her to find out just what the site plans to do after the presidential election that has carried it to the heights of digital fame.

Q: The Huffington Post has been riding high on the 2008 election, with ComScore numbers naming it as the top independent political destination on the Web. But everyone's acknowledging that traffic may drop significantly after the election. What is the company's strategy for this?
Morgan: That's a question that I feel like I've been asked a lot in the last couple of weeks. I think all news and information sites have been up this year. We look at our competitors' traffic really closely, too, and that political tide has lifted everybody's boats. I think a couple of things are going to happen after the election. One, what we've certainly seen over the interest in this election is that people are re-energized by the political process and they're very interested, particularly in light of the economy, in what a new administration will look like.

Because of that, you'll continue to see interest in that, in the new administration and who gets picked for what positions and what's the first thing they do and the second thing they do. Does the new president go abroad immediately and try to mend fences? Those kinds of things. I think there's still going to be a big interest in what's going on in Washington.

Do you have different strategies for if Barack Obama wins the election versus if John McCain wins?
Morgan: What's interesting about that is, that question assumes and even reading the headline in ComScore assumes that we are just a political site. Our tagline is "the Internet newspaper." So back to your original question, which I think answers the second question. We've worked really hard over the past year to grow all of our verticals, to launch a bunch of verticals. A bunch are new since this time last year...we have a lot of traffic coming to non-politics stuff, and prior to the most recent sort of frenzy of run-up and countdown, our traffic was sort of about 50-50, so 50 percent to political stories and 50 to everything else.

So we have really consciously grown and attracted an audience that's interested in a whole lot of things besides politics. I do think that one of the things that will be very interesting to see is the obsessiveness with which people are watching the election and being interested in the political process. We're also seeing that behavior on the business side with the economy every day: what happened to the Dow and what happened to the other economic numbers. We're seeing huge traffic for us in those areas so that in November and December, there may be more of a balance.

Have you been shifting resources to covering the financial crisis in more depth?
Morgan: Coverage of the economy folds into so many other parts of our verticals. The economy is tied so closely to politics that some of our politics writers and editors are writing about politics and also the economy: the impact, and what McCain thinks about the economy and what Obama thinks about the economy. The media vertical's another area. Media companies are laying off, their stock prices are getting hit, they're going through changes, they're prepping for the downturn, so that's business-related, too. So the economy is a big story across the board in many different areas, and that's how we're attacking it rather than, "No more style coverage! Start working on those Dow Jones charts!"

What's your election night tech strategy? Will Huffington Post have extra server power in? Will you be auto-refreshing the home page faster?
Morgan: Such a good question when you say auto-refresh. We turned off auto-refresh last December and we've got an AJAX dynamically delivered page. That was a decision we consciously made at the end of last year because we just felt that our page views were not authentic and that we wanted to see more authentic page view numbers, and the auto-refresh thing seems like a thing of the past, though a lot of news sites still use it.

In terms of election night coverage on the tech side, we did a pretty robust tech infrastructure overhaul over the winter in prep for a lot of fall traffic. The management team is in constant communication with the tech team. As we're hitting these record page view numbers daily, can our servers handle this? Can they handle 5x, 10x, 100x, whatever? Having come from a place that dealt with that stuff in spades, at CBS, I'm familiar with that super, super spike in traffic.

What was something that you wanted to do in election coverage and couldn't do for one reason or another?
Morgan: There isn't anything kind of top-of-mind. I think everybody feels like they've been pretty happy with the coverage we've done. I'd say, what could we do more of? We probably could've done a little bit more live blogging. But we feel like we've done a good job of engaging our bloggers.

What are some digital-politics features or applications that other media companies or Web sites have done that you think are really impressive?
Morgan: Yahoo's got a great electoral map that includes Huffington Post picks on who wins the electoral college in what states and what numbers that I think is pretty interesting. I think people like the kind of compare-and-contrast experience. We've liked working with them. AOL's done some interesting things with bloggers, sort of getting voices of bloggers and then getting real-time reaction, and they started that really, really early in the process.

On the mainstream news sites I've got to give everybody credit. I think everybody's evolved from this time last year, maybe having candidate pages, to experiences that are much more interactive where as a consumer you can add value and community.

People say that 2004 was the election where blogs took off and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube took off. What will people be saying was the digital trend that took off in the 2008 elections?
Morgan: What you've seen now in this political cycle is, you've really seen the blogosphere and both individual and mainstream news affect the political process. With Off the Bus, our citizen journalism program with NYU, we've had 12,000 citizens contributing and covering stories across the country, going to rallies, sitting in on conference calls, and really being able to bubble up all that information for mainstream media. It's been fantastic. They've broken a bunch of stories. So I definitely think that it's the rise of the empowerment of the individual journalist or the citizen journalist.

Media is getting hit hard in this economic climate. Ad-supported companies are getting hit hard. And there's a chance that The Huffington Post, like other sites, will see a traffic drop after the election. Are you going to have to do any layoffs?
Morgan: We don't anticipate that. We've had a really good year, ad-wise. We're in the game at a different point in our life cycle than the other mainstream players. We've seen the brand really grow to top of mind with both agencies and clients and the response has been really positive.

I do think everyone's looking at 2009 and thinking, "Do the projections I did in July still apply in 2009?" That's true, totally, across the board. But Internet advertising is still hugely more measurable, of great interest to more and more advertisers, and the value proposition of The Huffington Post is a strong one. You get not just politics, you get a ton of other news and information. It's a growing site and in terms of the audience it attracts, and granted this will change a bit as we get bigger, but it's a real influencer, educated audience, which I think will continue to be attractive to advertisers.

On the flip side, as a recent New Yorker article about Arianna Huffington highlighted, to some critics that demographic is known as "limousine liberals." Are you going to be changing your strategy at all to appeal to, dare I say, average Americans?
Morgan: For any news site, as it gets bigger the demographics change. Our advertising guys look at our demographics very carefully, and I don't think ComScore has a category for "limousine liberals," but our profile, our average user looks like the average user for other news sites, and we feel that we are in that sweet spot along with the other guys like CNN and MSNBC.

Did you have to do any damage control after that New Yorker piece?
Morgan: I thought the piece was great!

True, it wasn't as scathing as some people had expected. So, obviously, The Huffington Post has taken great steps to differentiate itself from just being Arianna Huffington's site. But how central is she to the operation? Should she decide to retire, would you have a Steve Jobs sort of situation where the heart of the company would be gone?
Morgan: Arianna is the most tireless worker in this whole company. She's a total force of nature, and she is a huge, huge promoter of the site, obviously. And we're absolutely grateful for all of her great energy and outreach and she's a very hard worker on not just being an external face of the business but being hugely influential inside the company as well as editor-in-chief. If you look at the company and how it's grown over the last year, we have a really solid management team. It's very much of a business structure, it's very evolved from what was started three years ago as a blog and aggregated news site into something more mainstream and more comprehensive. We're growing. And Arianna's a living brand and she's fantastic, but the site does a lot more than just politics.

On that note, you made your first foray into local news recently with Chicago. How's that going? When will we see more?
Morgan: Soon! You'll definitely see the next local vertical soon.

Which one?
Morgan: We're working on it. I won't name the city. But what we've been able to see with Chicago, and this a hallmark of The Huffington Post, because the team is nimble and agile and we have a very small team dedicated to Chicago--one editor--we can tweak...being able to tweak fast and quickly, on the fly has been huge.

LONDON--Perhaps it's fitting that Digg founder Kevin Rose chose the Future of Web Apps conference here as the place to elaborate on his company's international expansion strategy. London, after all, has become the San Francisco-based Digg's biggest hub of user activity. But with headlines dominated by financial disasters, life gets a little more complicated for a company determined to build up and keep hiring.

CNET News caught up with Rose shortly after his presentation on Thursday morning. Here's the first part of our two-part interview.

You're a geek hero. You've got a huge following. How much do you want to be "the Digg guy," especially as Digg is expanding and moving beyond its roots?
Rose: Well, I absolutely love my job. It doesn't feel like I'm working, ever, so that's a nice place to be in when you've spent the last four years feeling like you don't have a job and it's just something you enjoy doing every day. So I don't think that's going to get old for quite some time. I'll be at Digg for a while.

Digg founder Kevin Rose, who has since gotten a much shorter haircut.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

So what about being such a cult figure (as host of the Diggnation podcast)?
Rose: There's a lot of people that watch our podcast, and enjoy our podcast and say, hey, you know, you guys are funny because we get there and drink beers and comment on our favorite technology and geek-culture stories, so there's that group of people who enjoy what we do as far as making the podcast. I don't know, I'm just happy that people watch and that people enjoy what we're doing. Alex (Albrecht, Diggnation's co-host) and I, when we started the podcast, we really didn't have any idea how many people were going to be into it. We were just, like, "Hey, we used to work together at TechTV, why not just do something fun and hit record?" Even if nobody watches we'll still continue to do it because we like hanging out.

You said earlier this morning that Digg's going to focus on expanding its appeal, that right now only a tenth of Digg's visitors have registered for user accounts. Is Diggnation going to change, too?
Rose: No, Diggnation will always stay the same. It's just kind of a fun show. Only a small percentage of the people who watch Diggnation actually go to Digg, there's only about 250,000 people per week that watch Diggnation, and Digg has millions and millions of people. So it's not like they're really closely tied together.

You said you're going to stay at Digg for a while. You just raised a big Series C round. Does this mean the company's going to stay independent (i.e. not get bought) for longer than originally planned?
Rose: The nice thing about the last raise is that it wasn't, like "oh, we're out of money, we need to raise more," it was more based on the fact that we knew we wanted to expand into different languages and we knew we had to buy racks of servers over in Europe, and all that takes capital to make happen.

We sat down and said, okay, where do we want to be a few years from now and what are the resources that we need to make that happen? We would've ran out of cash had we executed on that plan to expand internationally. That raise was really, okay, let's build the team that we need in San Francisco to continue to evolve the product, and invest in R&D and continue to scale the site, but at the same time let's talk about international next year. So that's what this is for.

What about other social news sites? Are any of them doing things that Digg isn't that you're hoping to emulate in one way or another?
Rose: That's a good question. I really don't use anybody else's product. I've never used their services at all, I think I've maybe "buzzed" one article when (Yahoo Buzz) first came out. We don't really base our product decisions on what anybody else is doing.

But there's been no instance where you saw something really cool and wished you'd thought of it first?
Rose: I've seen some really interesting mashups of other peoples' data that are really fun to play around with, and I've thought it would be really cool to see what Digg data looks like with that, but I can't think of any one feature. I think some of the stuff that StumbleUpon is doing with their toolbar and providing recommendations in the toolbar is really interesting to us, but not right now. We have a very basic toolbar right now today.

How has the current financial situation changed things at Digg? That stuff really started to unfold right after you raised your Series C round.
Rose: Nothing's changed. One of the nice things about Digg is we've always run fairly lean. We have a small team and we're a very text-heavy site, so as far as bandwidth is concerned it's not like we're YouTube spending a million dollars a week on bandwidth. For us it's just always being conscious of who we're hiring and why we're hiring them, and do we need that person or not. We won't be a 400-person company in a year or two years. It's just picking the spots where we need some help and growing slowly, and staging that growth so it mirrors our own Web traffic growth...it's always been out of necessity.

Are you anticipating a traffic drop after the election?
Rose: We don't anticipate that, no. That's a good question though...we've always seen traffic grow month over month. We're fortunate enough to be in that position, and we've seen the different bumps as little things that come along. When the Olympics was going on we saw a little bump ther. When there's big tech news or Apple events you always see bumps there. We'll have to see. We haven't really done any estimates on that.

Facebook's appointment of Ted Ullyot as its first general counsel might spook some in freewheeling Silicon Valley: he served as chief of staff to former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and as an associate counsel to President George W. Bush.

But in an interview Monday with CNET News, Ullyot said that his past resume will make it easier for the fast-growing social network to deal with Washington insiders--because he used to be one himself.

"Having served in the executive branch in Washington and also in the judicial branch, I have a pretty good understanding of those issues," Ullyot said. "So to the extent that matters come up in those areas that have a legal component as distinct from a purely policy component, having a background in the federal government can help you understand the way government regulators think."

Ullyot declined to provide specifics on his role at Facebook, which he starts in the middle of October, with the justification that he isn't yet familiar enough with the company's workings. Fair enough.

For example, he wouldn't make a call on what would happen to any still-extant lawsuits against the ill-fated Beacon advertising program, or whether Facebook would take a stand against the U.S. House of Representatives' rejection of Monday's $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The general counsel at Microsoft, which has a $240 million stake in Facebook, has petitioned to the government to reconsider. "I'd just want to take a look at the issues," Ullyot said.

"In my prior senses (as a general counsel), what I've really concluded in those is that every company is very different, unique, and has a particular sense of legal issues and challenges," Ullyot explained. "And so the key for me, for any general counsel, is going to be to come on board, to study the issues, immerse yourself in the company, ask a lot of questions, and just get up to speed on the issues as fast as you can, so that's what you look forward to doing."

Ullyot said that Facebook had been looking to hire a general counsel for some time now, and that there was no particular reason that he was hired now as opposed to several months ago or down the road. In other words, Facebook didn't hire a full-time lawyer to bail it out of anything--though Ullyot might find himself dealing with the film and publishing industries soon, if an allegedly unsavory book and movie about Facebook's origins end up coming to fruition.

"Just getting to know it, (Facebook) is very mindful of Washington, very aware of Washington, and very savvy in the ways of Washington already," said Ullyot, who will relocate to the company's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters but will spend time in D.C. as needed. "I think that comes from Elliot Schrage heading up policy, and having someone like Sheryl Sandberg as COO, with her extensive Washington background as a chief of staff herself at a Cabinet agency."

So, not surprisingly, he thinks it's been good for Facebook to have seasoned executives on board to help its young founding team navigate their way through the real world. But he added that Facebook's existing legal team, which has been working with outside counsel, has done "an excellent job."

He did say that his role at Facebook will probably also reach the thousands of third-party developers working on the social network's developer platform; some of Facebook's most recent legal issues, like the Scrabulous affair, have dealt with the platform rather than the site itself. "To the extent that we've got legal interactions with (developers), contractual or otherwise, or working on standards, I would expect that legal is involved in those," Ullyot said.

There was one question he could answer concretely: Though Ullyot's undergraduate years at Harvard overlapped with COO Sheryl Sandberg's, he said that the two of them did not know each other.

Bebo's core demographic might be teens and young adults in the U.K., but President Joanna Shields said that now that the social network's acquisition by AOL is complete, it's time to start expanding. Now that she's in charge of AOL's "People Networks" division, which encompasses Bebo as well as the AIM and ICQ instant-messaging services, her goal is to expand the service's reach and bring it up to par with bigger rivals like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.

"If you look at Bebo (a year ago) it was much more of a youth brand," Shields said in an interview with CNET News.com Monday. "It looked younger, it had a younger feel to it, but over the course of my time here, over 18 months, we've evolved the DNA of the site, we've matured it." While the Bebo of the U.K. and Ireland will retain a youth vibe, the feel will be much more universal when it "expands into new markets," per Shields.

Additionally, as Bebo creeps into new geographic territories, advertisements will be served by AOL's Platform A technology, not by current ad partner Yahoo. Bebo's U.S. site will also transition from Yahoo to AOL ads.

"In each new market we go into, of course now that we have this extraordinary technology, we will launch with Platform A," Shields said.

Yahoo will continue to serve Bebo ads in three regions. "We have a very positive relationship with Yahoo in the U.K., Ireland, and Australia," Shields explained. "That current relationship goes until the end of 2009." She declined to specify what the plan would be after that, but she did say that she expects Bebo to be exempt from the difficulties some other social sites have on the monetization front because of its focus on media consumption rather than just communication.

"Sending an ad to someone who's communicating is quite different from someone that is consuming entertainment," she said, mentioning Bebo's original video programming as well as its "Open Media" platform, which partners with companies like MTV Networks, the BBC, and ESPN. "There's no surprise that we ended up with a media company, or a company with a media heritage, given the part of the spectrum of social networking where we reside, the category we tried to create--a social media network."

Shields said it's too early in the AOL ownership to be able to gauge whether Bebo would be launching a data portability project like Facebook's Facebook Connect or MySpace's Data Availability. "I'm a firm believer that you've got to be open," she hinted. With regard to further developer-related announcements, she explained, "We've been through this quiet period through the acquisitions...We haven't yet socialized those discussions with the AOL folks because we've been operating independently."

Bebo's application platform is notable because it's compatible with both the OpenSocial standard and Facebook's application code.

But right now the mantra is expansion first. "My goal and the goal of our team is to expand distribution," she explained, "and to build and to expose the Bebo experience to more and more territories."

Slide founder Max Levchin talks with Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li at Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Max Levchin made a name for himself as the co-founder of transaction system PayPal, one of the Web's foremost utilitarian services. Then he made a name for himself again at the helm of Slide, which isn't exactly in the same space. Its flagship product, "SuperPoke," has become the poster child--er, poster sheep--for criticism of social-networking developer applications as a silly fad.

On Wednesday, after his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I asked Levchin if he thought there were actually a chance for some social applications to emerge that are useful rather than goofy.

"There's definitely opportunity to build utilitarian, or pure utility, apps on Facebook," he said. So I asked him to give an example.

"Alcoholics Anonymous," Levchin said, without hesitation. "If you're trying to recover as an alcoholic, there's no easy way for you to join an anonymous group on Facebook. So creating an anonymous group type on Facebook for something that people have to get off their chest but don't really want to reveal their identity (in doing so)...it's pretty utilitarian. Grim, but utilitarian." Currently, Facebook's API doesn't permit developers to anonymize the social-networking experience.

I expressed my surprise with how little time it took Levchin to up with that kind of idea. He shrugged. "Maybe it's because I grew up in Russia."

AUSTIN, Texas--Mark Zuckerberg probably knew his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival would produce a lot of press, but he likely didn't expect it to turn out the way it did.

CNET News.com sat down to chat with the young Facebook founder fewer than 24 hours after the widely criticized onstage interview with BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy, in which a disappointed audience turned on Lacy and demanded better questions.

After the media flurry, Zuckerberg was understandably eager to move on and talk about different topics. But he still touched upon the incident, hinting that while he may not have been totally thrilled with the subject matter, he thought Lacy was still getting unnecessarily hounded.

The interview between journalist Sarah Lacy and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got ugly quick and then went downhill.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

"I thought she asked some interesting questions," Zuckerberg said. "We may have not talked about the things that were most relevant to the audience that was here, but I've worked with Sarah on a number of pieces, and I generally think she's really smart and didn't necessarily deserve the reaction that people gave her."

It wasn't the first time a crowd has started to get a bit energetic, Zuckerberg said. He likes to put a positive spin on it. "People shout things out because they're excited and passionate about what we're doing," he said. "People were shouting out things about, like, Beacon and privacy and things like that. Those were good questions for people to ask."

I asked Zuckerberg half-jokingly if he'd ever subject himself to an interview on The Colbert Report, where host Stephen Colbert has become notorious for putting interview subjects in extremely uncomfortable situations. Zuckerberg wouldn't give a definite answer, but he did say he thinks Colbert is "so funny."

Getting past the hype
Regardless of the media buzz over the SXSWi interview, Zuckerberg said he's still enjoyed himself at SXSWi. "It's been pretty interesting," he said. "I went to this panel on the worst Web sites...it was pretty funny."

But back to Facebook. Zuckerberg has said he would prefer if people focus less on the sensation--the backlash against Lacy, the press over Facebook's $15 billion valuation, his status as the youngest person that Forbes magazine has ever named to its list of billionaires--and more on what his company is actually doing. He reiterated that wish in Monday's interview.

"I feel like a lot of the press coverage around the company is on a few phenomenal events," he said, adding that he'd prefer to talk about "the way in which we help people interact and communicate, both on a subtle level of helping people make connections and increase the number of people that they can keep up relationships with, and increase their trust...(and) the sum of all those connections, and all that communication that's being enabled through the service."

Mark Zuckerberg

(Credit: From Zuckerberg's Facebook page)

OK, fair enough. But he's still Mark Zuckerberg, the tech industry's current wunderkind and Generation Y's foremost example of a future business leader. In today's atmosphere of Project Red, U2's Bono as a Silicon Valley investor, and Bill Gates' "creative capitalism," every high-profile CEO is getting asked how he or she will help save the world. That came up for quite a bit of time in Sunday afternoon's keynote interview with Lacy.

But Zuckerberg said that for Facebook, it's way too early to think about that sort of thing. "I think at this point, because we're not incredibly profitable, we're not at that stage of the company--hopefully we get there--that's not really something that we can do a lot of," he admitted in Monday's interview. "But I'd like to think that just what the company is trying to do in general, just helping people communicate, is actually making the world better."

"A lot of people are actually building really interesting applications that are more to the tone of traditional philanthropy, like the Causes application," he added. "Just by making this development platform, we're enabling some of those things. The way that we're going about it isn't by donating money directly to charity."

Cutting the app spam
Zuckerberg, who steered clear of some of his usual buzz phrases like "social graph" and "social utility," repeatedly stressed that Facebook is a young company and that its focus right now is on growth. Over the next few months, member profiles will be getting a redesign so that the interface is cleaner and runs more smoothly--and cuts down on many of the developer applications that have earned a reputation for being annoying, "spammy," or pointless.

"The direction that it was going in with a lot of platform applications--people would just install a lot of applications," Zuckerberg said. "It wasn't clear that they actually wanted a lot of the boxes that they had in their profiles, but a lot of people didn't take the effort to clean them up, and that kind of made profiles a little more cluttered than we would have wanted, and that also contributed to them being a little slower than we would have wanted."

Consequently, in conjunction with the profile redesign, the developer platform will be getting a bit "smarter." Members will be able to send out more invitations to their friends to join an application, as well as see activity from it in news feeds across the site, if it has high levels of user engagement and people actually like it.

"If an app where almost every request that gets sent gets accepted or that the person acts on it and enjoys receiving that request, then that app should be able to send way more requests or prompt users to send way more requests," Zuckerberg explained.

Conversely, he said, this will cut down on applications that spread by spamming members who don't actually end up using it. "If an app has a lower acceptance rate, we'd let them publish (fewer) requests...it definitely makes sense that the apps that are providing the most trustworthy and the most useful information will get to publish the most information into people's feeds."

He didn't provide many technicalities, but he insisted that small-time developers shouldn't be concerned that this means only the likes of big application development companies like RockYou and Slide will get exposure on the site.

"They should actually be pretty excited about this because if they're actually providing trustworthy information, then they'll be able to get way more distribution from this than they ever were under the old system," he said.

Zuckerberg also touched upon a longstanding Facebook rumor, namely the impending launch of an internal payment system that could allow developers to integrate PayPal-like functions into their applications and potentially provide Facebook with a new source of revenue besides advertising. He claimed, however, that the priority is to help developers rather than jack up Facebook's profit margin.

"Most of the revenue things that we're doing in the short term--their focus isn't on building a large revenue stream," Zuckerberg said.

Adding a payment system just makes sense, he added. "With a lot of applications, people need to pay for different things...You could go with an example like SuperPoke, with which people are buying sets of icons or signals that they can send to friends, which is purely a social gesture, but it's real capital that's being exchanged, or if you go with an example like a book or a song or something like that...A lot of these things can be inherently social or have large social components, and just kind of further the type of communication that's going on, but it involves real economic capital."

Looking at Facebook's future
Some critics have said Facebook is going to have issues handling the hardware to support new features and increased growth. Zuckerberg insisted that it's not that hard.

"We have multiple data centers. We have a couple on the West Coast. We have somewhat of a cluster on the East Coast too," he said. "We basically have this model where we can just put servers anywhere."

But maintaining adequate hardware is necessary to speed the site up, Zuckerberg said. "It can take almost 100 milliseconds round-trip for the physical packets to get from the West Coast to the East Coast, and it can take another hundred milliseconds or so to get to Europe. So I think just having more proximate data centers is an important thing."

And on whether the shaky forecast for the U.S. economy will get in the way of that kind of growth, Zuckerberg said he's not too concerned. "I don't spend that much time studying the overall economic climate, even though people seem to think that there's this general slowdown going on," he said. "It may slow down slightly, or it may not be affected, but in general, our growth is so rapid that I would be pretty surprised if it got affected in a meaningful way."

Besides a potentially tougher economic climate, there's also the prospect of competition on the horizon. Facebook is not a part of the OpenSocial developer initiative that Google has kick-started for social-media sites, and Zuckerberg says the company still hasn't made its mind up about whether to get on board in the future.

Back in November, he'd voiced concerns about how secure the new standard would be. "My stance then was that it had iterations to go, but that Google is very talented at developing these things," Zuckerberg explained. "We're still kind of in somewhat of the same place, where it hasn't launched yet. So we're still kind of waiting to see how it plays out. I have a lot of confidence in those guys."

And, he added, the way to compete is to keep innovating. "I think that what we're watching out for is not one specific company, but just how the whole trend goes and what our role is going to be," Zuckerberg explained.

"Most of the social services that people use aren't going to be built by us," he said. "And that's cool. That's a good way to be. And so if Google's building some stuff, it could be completely complementary with us, but it's probably also going to move the ecosystem forward. We just kind of want to watch the direction that things are going in."

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi.

Moblogic.tv's Lindsay Campbell with executive producer Adam Elend at South by Southwest Interactive.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--Lindsay Campbell rose to fame as the perky, witty hostess of finance video blog Wallstrip, made headlines when the show was purchased by CBS Interactive, and made even more headlines when she passed anchor duties on to new host Julie Alexandria so that she could take the helm of Moblogic.tv, a new video blog about news and finance.

Moblogic premiered on Friday, in conjunction with the South by Southwest Interactive Festival here. I took a few minutes to talk with Campbell about her new show, whether she gets recognized on the street, Brangelina (read on, you'll get it), and if we might be seeing Moblogic in taxicabs any time soon.

Your new show, Moblogic, just launched. How has the response to the first episode been?
Lindsay Campbell: I've been here at the South by Southwest conference and interviewing people, just on the main floor while they're checking in, so I've been a little bit removed from my computer, which I think is a good thing. I'd probably be obsessively reading the comments, et cetera. But we have had an overwhelmingly friendly response just from fans of Wallstrip that have decided that they're going to see what we're up to next.

We've also had some exciting news, which is that we were planning on launching without an advertiser so that we could get the content out there, build our viewer base, and this morning there was a clamor for sponsorship. So we actually got a sponsorship deal now that's through the end of our first month, and we'll see how it goes.

And who's the sponsorship deal with?
Campbell: GM (General Motors), actually their Saturn brand...they had been thinking about it, they saw the content, and they decided to advertise. Which has been good for us, we're trying to validate what we're doing: content created exclusively for the Internet within a large network that creates for a lot of other types of media. So it's good when we get advertising. We don't need it but it's good when we get it.

How often are random people recognizing you now?
Campbell: You know what's funny is that we've gone to a couple of conferences, and it's been the only place that I really get recognized because it's a self-selecting group of people. Here, people seem to recognize my face but not know why I'm carrying the orange (Moblogic) microphone instead of the green (Wallstrip) one. And then I have to tell them, "Oh, yeah, I used to do Wallstrip." Associating yourself with a new brand, it's trying in the beginning, but I'm getting used to it.

How's Wallstrip doing without you?
Campbell: It's really doing well, in fact, numbers have gone up. (Laughs.) I'm OK with that...I like to joke that the numbers have gone up exclusively because I left because there were people holding back on watching because I was there, but I think that in addition to proclivities, whatever you like to watch in a host, Julie's doing a really good job. The quality of the show hasn't fallen off, in my opinion.

But another thing that's happened is that we've gotten a lot of features on the front of YouTube, which of course generates views, and we also have really enabled our archives. Our page views count whether it's today's show or whether it's 30 days ago's show, so they're watching one Wallstrip and then maybe watching four others, and that really builds our aggregate use for the month. Our page views for this month are crazy, and January and February were also really good. And that's good, because we were trying to prove that we could launch a new brand and not lose our first brand in the process.

Are the rumors true that you were desperate to leave Wallstrip because you hate reporting on finance?
Campbell: Is that really a rumor? (Laughs.) You know what's funny is I never pretended to like finance. That was one of the angles of our show, is that I'm a real person that you can touch and feel, and I have my own ideas, and I'm hosting a finance show, and I'll talk about stocks because I can explore that too, but it's not what I live and breathe. On the one hand, we never tried to present me as loving stocks. On the other hand, I actually ended up really enjoying what I was doing. I had no impetus to leave other than wanting to try a new challenge. That's really funny though.

Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, has talked recently about Moblogic as a new addition to "the Wallstrip family." So are we going to see more members of the Wallstrip family now too?
Campbell: We're like Angelina and Brad, and everyone knows if we're going to have more babies!

Yeah, but would they be Shilohs or Maddoxes? You know, produced in-house or acquired?
Campbell: That's actually a great metaphor for the situation. It takes quite a bit of energy to launch a new daily show, so I'd tell you if we had another one we're going to launch next month. We're looking at, you know, within the next nine months, so within a true human gestational period to create a new show. And I'm not going to rule out acquisitions, or maybe partnerships is a better way to put it.

But the reason that Wallstrip was acquired, despite all the rumors on that front, really was that (CBS Interactive) saw people doing online video that was compelling about a subject that was a niche, and they wanted us to do it for other things. That's part of what Moblogic is. Moblogic is news and politics, subjects that are really near and dear to mine and (Wallstrip co-creators) Adam (Elend)'s and Jeff (Marks)'s hearts, and our entire crew is really fired up about doing that kind of content. And if something presents itself as a really great opportunity in another vertical and we have the resources to do it, that fits part and parcel into what CBS brought us on to do.

How have things been different since the acquisition?
Campbell: Really, not that different. They acquired us, and gave us a great amount of resources, whatever we needed to keep producing the show the way that we had with a lot of respect to the way that they liked how we'd been doing things. We kept our own studio space, and pretty much the same level of supervision.

They don't come into the studio and tell us what to do. They'll give us comments from the lawyers to make sure that we're being legal, but they let us do our own thing and explore and really try to figure out the next level of web video. Because once you have a daily show that people are watching, it's all about innovate, innovate, innovate. That's what we tried to do with the site for Moblogic, is really innovate how interactive it is. We said that Wallstrip is interactive, but was it really interactive? That's going to be the next thing for us in both shows, really make it powerfully interactive.

So how are you building community and encouraging participation?
Campbell: We'll absolutely have a viewer-generated content section, and different ways to link to it, and basically the philosophy of our video-creating group is to create the video and then put it where the viewer wants it, put it where they are already watching video, and they will come to you eventually and if it's content that they want to watch, make it really easy for them to find it.

We'll be everywhere. We're working on our Facebook community right now, working on our MySpace community now, and we really need to work on the Bebo-Meebo-Leebo-Wheebo communities as well. That's definitely the future of building an online video community, just being in as many places and germinating in as many places as possible, including the CBS Audience Network, which Quincy could explain better than I can.

The "girl in front of a camera, talking about stuff" has almost become a Web cliché by now. How do you hope that Moblogic will be different?
Campbell: One of the things that we'd like to move beyond is just being a Web talking head, like a Web counterpart to the TV talking heads. So a lot of the talking on the show is going to be done by people that we meet all over the country, and eventually hopefully in other countries, about the topics that we're talking about. I'm not an expert, I'm just expert at talking to people, and that's how the stories are going to get formed.

Then the next part of the adventure is having our stories linked together with other stories in our archives so you can watch the swell of public opinion as it ebbs and flows throughout time on a certain topic or on related topics. We're working on conceptually trying to come up with what are the major themes in news, and then connecting them all really intelligently in our archives...Any show that comes into the field right now has to have more depth. You have to be able to reach into it and get more information out of it because you could just read a blog post and get the information there. The man-on-the-street element, the travel element, not just reporting from one city--that's going to be kind of new for the Web.

Do you have any fun trips on the books?
Campbell: I'm down for whatever travel we're going to do, because that's been a dream of mine forever, just to have a job that involves travel. That's the height of fashion...The two exciting trips that we have on the books right now that are booked are both (political) conventions, in August and September, in Denver and Minneapolis for the elections. And that is like, stop-your-heart exciting for me. I think the towns themselves are going to be a little crazy, but we're going to try to capture some of that at-the-convention energy that you want to feel because there's really important news being made, and which I feel tends to get filtered out when it's presented by someone who's polished. So that's going to be an amazing experience, and every day I lobby for a new location.

What are some of your favorite Web shows right now?
Campbell: I spend a lot of my time capturing bits and pieces of Web video, and then sort of curate it myself, because a lot of my energy is spent in shooting every day. I think Epic Fu is an amazing show. I wish that they updated more frequently, but that's the nature of having to do a highly produced show like that. That's the kind of stuff that I like. Produce it like it's for television, and then trick me into thinking that I'm watching television.

What do you think of Quarterlife?
Campbell: I think that Quarterlife (the scripted Web drama that made the jump to NBC, only to promptly get canceled, though it lives on online) is just poorly executed. I'm not that into the story, I haven't seen enough of it to say whether it's a good story or whether it's good writing or not, but I really didn't find the actors that appealing. I know it hasn't died or anything, but no, that didn't do it for me.

I'll tell you the show I've been raving about: it's not created for the Web, but the way they distribute it was very Web savvy, and that's HBO's In Treatment. And that show, from the second it came on, they did it on-demand. I watched it on iTunes. It's a 30-minute show...and the show is brilliant, the acting is brilliant, and I watched it only on the Web. I watch almost everything on my laptop, unless I'm in a movie theater, and that's like, once a year. But content like that could easily be created by someone creating just for the Web, it just so happens that HBO did it really well and did it first. That's the kind of content I like. I like drama.

In Treatment is very cross-platform, because they're distributing online, which is very unusual for HBO. Could you see Moblogic potentially winding up on TV? Or like LX.TV got bought by NBC and now they show it in New York City taxis.
Campbell: I don't daydream about that, because I think that two- to three-minute content on your television ends up feeling more like a commercial, like an interstitial, and even when we were doing Wallstrip, our content isn't really light. It's lightly presented, but the content itself has some meat on its bones. I wouldn't want it to be shunted into a sort of interstitial position.

We're creating it in HD and it could easily be on your television, but I feel like the more likely way that it will go on your television is through, like, your Apple TV. If CBS decided to put it on their network, in their off-hours or where they needed content, I would welcome it. If they decided to turn it into a half-hour show, I would welcome it, but I do think it's Web-native, and by Web-native I mean that it really exists in a packaged form, two to three minutes, and it's the kind of thing that you're at work or you just want an inspiration or news, or you want to ponder a story and click on it and watch it on your computer and then it's ephemeral and it's gone after that.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

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 going to be in charge of keeping things running smoothly--and probably keeping Facebook's young executives in line, too.

Do you think this is going to help advertiser confidence?
Mark Zuckerberg: The reason why we did this is primarily to scale all of our different business operations. Advertising is definitely one piece of that, and Sheryl has a lot of experience there. But the primary reason why we did this is just because Facebook is scaling very quickly, and if we want to reach our goal, which is to help everyone in the world communicate more efficiently, we need to build an organization that's going to grow and scale globally. And someone like Sheryl, who has experience doing this, is going to be a tremendous asset to us in doing that.

Sheryl Sandberg is the latest in a handful of high-profile Google employees hired at Facebook (i.e. Benjamin Ling, Gideon Yu). Are we seeing a "Google-ization" of Facebook here?
Zuckerberg: I think there are a lot of really interesting companies out there, and different experiences that people have before they joined here. (Sandberg) is really the only senior executive at the company who's come from Google so far. Gideon (Yu) was at Google for a very short period of time after YouTube was sold to Google, but that's not his primary experience.

What will be the first area where we see Sandberg's influence and expertise at Facebook?
Zuckerberg: I think it's going to be subtle in a lot of ways because the nature of operations is that you're scaling an organization and powering other people. It's not that Sheryl is going to be doing all these things herself, but Facebook already has 500 employees and it's scaling very quickly, and I think it's just going to go a lot more smoothly with someone who's talented like her here.

How will her role be different from Owen Van Natta's role as chief operating officer and then chief revenue officer?
Zuckerberg: Well, they were different roles. Owen, as chief revenue officer, was mostly focused on direct sales, which is what we have now, and business development. He was just focused in different areas. I wouldn't view this as really a replacement there, as other people have characterized it. Owen was doing that role, and he wanted to be a CEO, and I think Owen did great work here and I'm supporting him in doing that. With bringing in a COO, we just decided it was the right time for him to go and do that. Sheryl's role is going to be managing sales and business development but also a handful of other things.

So there's going to be all the different sales channels, direct and inside and online sales, and human resources, and marketing, communications and public policy...Sheryl will be in charge of all these different operations, and our consumer operations, the user operations group. It's a large organization for someone to oversee, and she's going to be primarily responsible for scaling that organization and scaling those operations.

What do you expect Facebook's employee head count to be at the end of 2008?
Zuckerberg: We have our projections that say we will probably get very near, maybe over a thousand, but it really just depends. We're hiring very aggressively just in terms of finding as many talented people as we can, and right now we're having a lot of success in doing that. So I think there's a good chance that we'll continue to grow very quickly this year, but I think over the long term in order to meet our goal just in terms of building this communication system that helps everyone in the world communicate more efficiently, that's going to require building a substantial business, and probably a lot of people all over the world, and we're going to need an organization, a set of operations that can do that. Sheryl's going to be really critical to helping us do that.