The Social

AUSTIN, Texas--In a packed conference room at the Austin Convention Center, two high-profile figures in new media took the stage for a highly anticipated interview, and neither one was Mark Zuckerberg.

Rather, it was billionaire entrepreneur and former Dancing with the Stars contestant Mark Cuban interviewing former Disney CEO and current Web video entrepreneur Michael Eisner at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

"I'm the moderator, which I'm not used to being," Cuban quipped. "We learned a lot from watching the Mark Zuckerberg interview," he added jokingly, "so I'll just talk about me."

But for the most part (minus a lengthy monologue about the difficulties of interactivity on the Web), Cuban left the floor to Eisner to talk about The All-for-Nots, a new Web-based video series created by his new-media production company, Vuguru.

The series, which he describes as "a Spinal Tap-ish kind of rock 'n' roll thing" about a fictional indie-rock band from Brooklyn, was created in conjunction with the production team behind the popular video show The Burg.

It's a far cry from his days at the helm of Disney. But, the media mogul said, "I like experiments."

Eisner's investment group, Tornante, launched Vuguru a year ago along with its inaugural series, the teen drama Prom Queen. Despite promotion on MySpace.com and Eisner's name value, the former Disney chief that the endeavor "didn't make money" and that he believed Web video was still several years away from profitability.

Yet he's moving forward with The All-for-Nots. "One of the things that we thought would be interesting in my company was to see if the time had come for story-driven professional content to find a place on the Internet, possibly be monetized, to see where the business was heading," Eisner said. "It's been an interesting experience, and we've learned a lot."

Eisner told Cuban and the audience that he's pushing ahead in online video because it's going to pay to be a pioneer. "All of a sudden, we're going to wake up, and professionally driven content...for the Internet is going to explode," Eisner said. Later, he added, "Those people working now in it are going to be the Steven Spielbergs of the next generation."

Michael Eisner

Right now, though, online video is a land grab constantly in flux. There are no rules yet, Eisner said, to the point where company strategies can change erratically and make the process all the more complicated. For example, he said, the distribution strategy for The All-for-Nots will be different from Prom Queen because potential content distribution partners didn't present them with the same deals.

"Every time you go to a MySpace or MSN or YouTube or Google, every month, they change the strategy," Eisner said. "People actually paid us money (for Prom Queen)." With The All-for-Nots, he explained, some of the same content partners had wanted Vuguru to pay them and then get the money back through advertising revenue sharing.

So the content partners this time--which include Bebo, Imeem, YouTube, Hulu, Veoh (which counts Eisner among its board of directors), and Mark Cuban's HDNet--will be a different set, but Eisner said he doesn't care, as long as it's distributed to plenty of eyeballs. "We have to go it any way we can go. We start at the top, we start at the bottom, we start at the sides." That's certainly start-up rhetoric.

The lack of a central distribution channel for online video, Eisner said, makes grabbing eyeballs even more difficult. "Veoh (and) Hulu are development platforms that are becoming kind of the TiVo of the Internet, trying to clarify it," he explained. "Eventually, we'll try to organize the Internet onto your home television screen. Right now, I know it seems mind-bogglingly difficult."

As he continued, he had a few kind words for Apple czar Steve Jobs, of whom Eisner has famously been more than a bit critical in the past. "Eventually, there will be a few more Steve Jobses around the world who make technology simple."

Mark Cuban

Eisner talked about Vuguru's strategy of finding existing "indie" video entrepreneurs on the Web and providing them with big-money resources. "(I) find the people who are doing interesting things on their own," he said. "I want those people, because I'll put up a little bit more money and hope that what has always happened in the past will happen in the future, which is that somebody will watch it, and that will drive viewership to our door, and it's easier because there are a lot of doors out there."

Cuban asked Eisner if he thought traditional media would ever "get" online content. "I think they should participate, and they will eventually be very successful," Eisner said. "These people are not stupid. They understand what's happening. The business, though--the economics are so small." For an emerging field without huge profits (yet), it might not be up their alley.

"The people that are like me," Eisner mused, "old mogul-type people, those are probably the people to stay away from. They've got three beach houses and four wives."

Mark Cuban cracked a joke alluding to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, currently embroiled in a sex scandal, and then let Eisner continue: "For them to get in a van with two other people, and stay in a Days Inn, and travel around the country and shoot (video) on a shoestring is hard."

But Eisner still aligns himself with those old-media moguls in many ways, as he revealed when he fielded a question from the audience about what he thinks of Creative Commons, "remix culture," and alternatives to traditional copyright.

"I have a long history, obviously, of believing in copyright," he said. "I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights. President Lincoln introduced a lot of this, fought for (the idea that) to pay people for their intellectual work was no different than paying them for their physical work. And nobody would think twice about paying someone for their physical work."

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

AUSTIN, Texas--"Yesterday's Q&A wasn't enough fun!" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joked as he walked up to the stage at the "developer garage" event that the company had organized as part of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. The 23-year-old CEO had opted to take some time and answer questions from the audience in between presentations geared toward developers.

Just hours earlier, Zuckerberg had sat down for an interview with CNET News.com about the company's future.

Speaking to a packed room at the Pangaea nightclub in downtown Austin, Zuckerberg's casual attitude and frequent quips at the "Developer Garage" were a far cry from the awkwardness of Sunday afternoon's SXSWi keynote, where he was interviewed by reporter Sarah Lacy and the audience became vocally disgruntled. While he typically stuck to his talking points about efficient communication and control over profile data, Zuckerberg offered a few interesting tidbits about the company's current challenges and future plans.

There was no introduction or speech: Zuckerberg just opened up the floor to questions, only to get an immediate question from a developer who wanted to know when a new feature about APIs for wall posts would be available. Zuckerberg didn't seem to expect that the questions would get so technical immediately. "While I said that we could ask about anything we wanted today," he said with a short laugh, "I don't think this is necessarily a great forum to lobby for specific features in Platform." He did provide the developer with some form of answer.

The second question was about Zuckerberg's reaction to the keynote and whether he'd dropped by for the impromptu Q&A to "do-over" what many people thought was a botched interview. "We were planning this Developer Garage before then, and I was planning on coming by," he said. Regarding the keynote, "We just didn't open it up to questions from people early enough. Sarah asked a lot of questions that I thought were pretty interesting...at the end, people asked really interesting questions."

Another audience member asked about recent statistics that suggest Web users spend twice as much time on MySpace than on Facebook. "I don't know if that's true," Zuckerberg said, and then insisted that the two are very different to the point where it might not be relevant to compare them. "We don't view ourselves as a traditional media property or media portal, which I think is how MySpace would define themselves."

Other questions addressed Facebook's impending payment system ("a service for developers, and we'll see where it goes"), and the popularity of casual-gaming applications on the site. On that one, Zuckerberg said Facebook hadn't anticipated how wild its success would be. "There have...been whole categories that we didn't necessarily anticipate getting popular," he said, and started talking about games like Scrabulous. "It's just not necessarily in the DNA of the company to build those sorts of things."

One developer in the audience asked Zuckerberg if Facebook could pledge to match the move of any other major social network in terms of making data portable, in the manner of OpenSocial or DataPortability. "No," he said. "I don't think that we can necessarily be sure that what others are doing is correct. However, I do think that we're philosophically aligned with wanting data to be portable within different sites, so that's something that we're going to work on doing."

Someone else asked about what might happen if Facebook faced a situation where it was pressed to share user information with a government entity, in the U.S. or otherwise. "Making sure that people's private information is private is a really important thing for us to do. We're not openly working with governments or anything. That said, we have to follow law," Zuckerberg said, and insisted that Facebook would avoid "sitations where following the law is going to mean that we have to compromise people's privacy. One of the things we're thinking about internally right now is how to approach China." It's an ongoing debate, the young CEO said.

"In general, there are ways to position these things and make decisions, and set them up so that you create minimal exposure," he added amorphously."

Still another question was met with resounding applause, primarily because it came from the founder of the cult-phenomenon Web site Icanhascheezburger.com. The "lolcat" enthusiast inquired about people who are cutting back on their Facebook use and whether it concerns Zuckerberg.

"I don't know why specifically some people might have not used it, or might be using it and then using it less," Zuckerberg said. He then connected it to the chaos of the Facebook developer platform, and said that developments in the application system would clean that up. "An incredible amount of people's experience is platform apps, and that's good, that was our intention." But, Zuckerberg said, "we've aligned people's incentives poorly," with too much focus on just viral spread rather than usefulness of an application. With impending modifications, "spammy" apps will have a tougher time spreading, and ones that get used frequently (rather than just installed) will be able to proliferate.

The Icanhascheezburger guy wasn't the only Internet-famous audience member to ask a question. Soon after, a familiar voice inquired: "I'm Robert Scoble and I got kicked off of Facebook for a day," the popular blogger said. He asked Zuckerberg what he thought of the ability to port data off Facebook, which is what happened with the script that saw his account temporarily banned.

"I think that these are some of the questions that are really important, that need to be answered," Zuckerberg answered. For example, he said he thinks syndicating the News Feed through RSS would be "pretty interesting," but it would mean that users have less control over privacy settings. "I don't think anybody necessarily knows the answer at this point."

"It was just the act of scraping. A lot of the people who are building scrapers for Facebook actually have the intention to spam," he said. "We just have a policy against that."

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.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talks to BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy at SXSWi.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

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. Anyone hoping for big news from the company may have wound up disappointed: the only thing that nobody had really heard before was that the site will be launching its French version on Sunday night. But come on, this is Facebook--they're notoriously tight-lipped. Nevertheless, the audience was eager for dirt, and that impatience eventually turned into a bit of moderate heckling.

"Most of the stuff that's been written about Facebook since the platform launch has been corporate stuff," Lacy started off, addressing Zuckerberg in what was by far the highest-profile keynote at any SXSWi event. "The core of why you're doing so well is the site itself." She asked Zuckerberg what he'd rather people focus on instead of the company's valuation and the fact that he has yet to turn 24.

"A lot of the focus has been on things that we as a company have not been as focused on," Zuckerberg replied. "The thing that we are trying to do at Facebook is just help people communicate and connect." He talked about how Facebook usage in Colombia has gone up since the site became available in Spanish and became a focal point for activist organization against the country's guerilla army.

Did he ever think people would do that? "No," Zuckerberg said, dozens of camera bulbs flashing around him as though he were Justin Timberlake.

Talk of changing the world dominated the first half of the keynote. "I heard this story a few months ago that's absolutely unbelievable," Zuckerberg said, and talked about Facebook's presence in the Middle East. He'd heard that youths in Lebanon had been connecting with one another on Facebook and broadened their horizon beyond insular communities where religious fundamentalism permeated the culture. "They just had a broader understanding and more empathy for what was out there on the world and that really changed their outlook on things."

Lacy then asked if Facebook was proactively working on specific tactics that could, in one way or another, change the world.

"Um," Zuckerberg hesitated, and then said, "I think what we're doing as a mission is a very important thing..." Clearly, this was an answer on which Zuckerberg hadn't been quite as expertly coached. When he trailed off, Lacy went into a mildly humiliating story about the first time she interviewed Zuckerberg and was surprised to see how socially awkward he was, and related that he'd said, "That's really hard" when she asked him to say more than two words at a time. It was the first of several "embarrassing story about another time when I interviewed Mark" anecdotes that Lacy went into throughout the talk.

Of profits and philanthropy
A mildly stymied Zuckerberg then re-addressed the topic of philanthropy. "There are a lot of really big issues with the world that need to be solved," he said, "and what we're doing as a company is basically building an infrastructure on which some of those problems can be solved."

"Why does there need to be a big organization order to channel peoples' voices?" he said. "Communication should be efficient enough that these people should have a voice, and issues that are important to these people should be able to be heard" without a massive nonprofit or celebrity-filled initiative backing it. "There needs to be a solid base for people to communicate that needs to built not top-down by legislation or countries, but bottom-up" by people on the ground. He added that because Facebook's business is "around break-even," it doesn't have a whole lot of money to throw around in the manner of Google's Google.org.

Back on the topic of international expansion, Lacy let it slip that Facebook's French version would be launching on Sunday night, and asked why Zuckerberg was so confident that it would be able to catch on across the world. "The need that we're tapping into is a universal need," he asserted.

Then the conversation turned to what everyone in the financial sector has been scratching their heads about: how Facebook will be able to turn a profit worthy of its $15 billion valuation. "We want the way that we make money to be in line with how people use the site," he said, alluding to the Social Ads strategy that launched in November.

Lacy then brought up the speculation that Facebook's banner ad deal with Microsoft wouldn't be sustainable, to which Zuckerberg said, "I think (Microsoft's) very happy with the deal," he said. "Obviously, as a private company we're not sharing stats on that, but I can tell you that it's going really well."

Mistakes were made
When someone in the audience shouted out, "Beacon sucks!" Zuckerberg replied, "Thank you." Later, he elaborated: "When we announced that, we probably got a little ahead of ourselves and said we had more of it figured out than we actually did," Zuckerberg said of the "mistake" that Facebook had made with the way it launched Social Ads and Beacon.

"In our company, Beacon isn't part of the ad team, it's part of the platform team. And there's this trend where we think that these social networks and social services are going from being these large monolithic sites...to a collection of social services." He mentioned in-house projects like the News Feed and inboxes, and then started talking about developer activity.

"Our DNA as a company isn't set to develop a lot of these things," he said. An "increasing amount" of developer activity surrounding Facebook, he elaborated, will go on outside the site. "That's just going to be an increasingly important part of the ecosystem." Beacon was a "first step" with bringing third-party activity onto the site.

"I think we made a lot of mistakes both in terms of how we communicated it, and some interface things," Zuckerberg admitted. "We're still learning as a company."

Lacy noted that uproar over the launch of Facebook's News Feed had eclipsed the Beacon controversy, which was fueled largely by a vocal minority. But both, she said, concerned privacy, and asked whether the site will continue to face privacy concerns. "The thing that's really important is that we need to give people complete control over their information," Zuckerberg answered. He said that only 20 or 25 percent of Facebook users share their cell phone numbers, and that they have the option to only share it with their friends rather than their entire networks.

"All of the mistakes that we've made are because we didn't give people enough control," he said.

On to the next topic: Facebook developer applications, and the criticisms that they're unproductive and full of spam. "There are pretty big changes underway with the system now," Zuckerberg hinted. "We've basically said that we have some distribution channels, you can send requests to people, you can send notifications...we allow you to do everything that you want up to a point."

Now for some of the juicy stuff! Well, not really. Lacy asked about the recent gossip that Facebook plans to launch a music service. "I don't know," Zuckerberg said. "We talk to a lot of companies all the time about a lot of different things." He said that there are plenty of music applications on Facebook and that the company has not touched upon it internally. "There are lots of developers who fileld that niche, so we don't even need to."

"As a company, we're out and we're talking to people in the space but building relationships," he said, but said that Facebook has "nothing to talk about right now" about the "iTunes killer" rumors.

After not-so-subtly pegging her impending book in which she extensively interviewed Zuckerberg, Lacy then asked up-front, "You don't actually think you're worth $15 billion?"

"I just don't think that's what we're thinking about," Zuckerberg said. "We want to get as little dilution as possible and raise money on the most favorable terms." He said that with a high valuation, Facebook can do business and recruit top talent more efficiently.

"Definitely an interesting time for us"
Zuckerberg says that the company also "made some management changes" after the internal bickering surrounding whether the company should have taken the $1 billion acquisition offer that Yahoo served it in 2006. Facebook famously turned it down, hoping to grow to a greater valuation first. "There were a set of people at the company who joined when it was way smaller, for whom if they could sell the company for a billion dollars, that would achieve a lot of their goals...(but) most of the people who started the company are still around."

On the company's new chief operating officer, former Googler Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg said, "We'd been looking for someone who could help us scale our operations...it's growing really quickly and so having someone who can help us scale is just going to be very important for the coming years."

And is it hard to be CEO as the company gets bigger and Zuckerberg is invariably less hands-on when it comes to the product development? "It's definitely an interesting time for us," he said.

Audience response to the keynote was mixed--but on the negative side of mixed.

Judging by activity on Twitter, a sizable number of the audience was slightly disappointed with Lacy's tendency to go into anecdotal stories about Zuckerberg rather than asking him more tough questions. She alluded to something being a "Lesley Stahl" moment, and Zuckerberg retorted, "You have to ask questions!" to which the audience erupted into applause.

Then, as Lacy was talking about Zuckerberg's tendency to detail the minutiae of his business plan in longhand notebooks, someone in the back of the room shouted out, "Talk about something interesting!"--more wild applause--and a flustered Lacy opened up the floor to a few audience questions. (Editors' note: Sarah Lacy spoke on video after the Q&A with Omar L. Gallaga of the Austin American-Statesman.)

One question the audience was what Facebook's biggest obstacle is. "I think a lot of it is around, it's basically around building these systems and giving people control while also giving people an easy product," he said. "In terms of the next year or so, that's going to be a huge thing that we're working on."

Another audience member asked whether Google is pissed off that Facebook keeps so much information internal rather than out on the Web and searchable. "I don't think that they get pissed. They're very nice guys," Zuckerberg said.

In closing, Lacy asked Zuckerberg if he had anything to say as a conclusion. "I didn't think this has been that painful!" Zuckerberg said in response to the audience heckling. "It's important to focus on the trends and the things that are going on in the world, and this is a good conference to do that at."

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

Alice Marwick (bottom right, in the pink jacket) leads a discussion about Internet fame at SXSWi.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--What does it mean to be "Internet-famous?"

That was the topic of conversation at "I'm Internet Famous: Status in Social Media," a South by Southwest Interactive "core conversation" hosted by Alice Marwick, an NYU doctoral candidate studying feminism and social media.

Not surprisingly, a good handful of the attendees at the "conversation" displayed various degrees of Internet fame (or notoriety): Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley, Valleywag writer Melissa Gira Grant, video personality and dating columnist Julia Allison, BoingBoing's Joel Johnson, Ypulse's Anastasia Goodstein, Budget Fashionista blogger Kathryn Finney, Boinkology editor Lux Alptraum, and podcaster Dave Delaney (he co-hosts the "Two Boobs and a Baby" parenting podcast with his wife).

Drop any one of those names in a setting outside the technology community, and it's more than likely that you'll get one blank stare after another. That doesn't mean "microcelebrity" isn't worth talking about. Internet fame is insular, but it's still fame among a very connected and tuned-in subset of the population.

"Pretty much any group, or any community, no matter how big or small, has a kind of hierarchy," Marwick explained. It's not evil, she said. "That's just a normal way that people organize themselves." The Web is no exception.

So what makes people Internet-famous? Attendees shouted out suggestions like page views among the content-creator and blogger communities, valuation and investors among start-up founders, the ratio of "followers" to "following" on Twitter, and how valuable one's reputation is as an "information broker" (i.e. if Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble recommends something, it'll get at least temporary traction).

But we still can't confuse Internet fame with mainstream fame, no matter how high-profile an event like SXSWi, packed to the seams with Web-based "microcelebrities."

"A lot of the time, we overvalue our Internet celebrity," one person in the conversation said, referring to the fact that a popular blogger had recommended the Jeff Buckley cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and it promptly shot to the top of the iTunes download chart, seemingly vindicating that blogger's influence.

Only problem is, people soon realized that pop culture behemoth American Idol had recently featured the song, too.

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

AUSTIN, Texas--"Dude, this sucks."

You could hear a whole lot of people saying that on Saturday night as the first real evening of South by Southwest Interactive Festival's after-parties kicked into gear. So how come it sucked? Well, it was the crowds. The lines outside the Google party at Light Bar, the Avenue A-Razorfish party at Six Lounge, and the 16Bit party at Scoot Inn were so long that they instigated plenty of woeful conversations about whether SXSWi had gotten so big and so mainstream that it just wasn't any fun anymore.

Gary Vaynerchuk's wine-soaked 'undergound' SXSWi party.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

I, for one, was about ready to call it a night after getting my toes stepped on one too many times at Scoot Inn. But then, while attempting to catch a cab back downtown, I ran into a couple of people, including WineLibrary.tv's Gary Vaynerchuk, who became locally famous for the liquor store he owns and Internet-famous for starting a video blog in conjunction with it. He and his buddies weren't about to stand around for a half hour just to get into the 16Bit party.

"I'm not dealing with this s***," Vaynerchuk called out in his Sopranos-worthy Jersey accent. "This isn't New York or L.A.; I'm not waiting in this line. Everybody come to the Marriott for free wine!"

So a few friends and I followed Vaynerchuk's instructions and headed to the hotel, where we were expecting to find a handful of dudes drinking cheap pinot noir for an hour or so before heading off to bed. Turns out that the eccentric sommelier, with the help of buddy Frank Gruber and the perpetually camera-toting Brian Solis, had set up a lively little shindig off the lobby of the hotel and had accompanied it with the seven--yes, seven--cases of wine that Vaynerchuk had shipped to Austin from the brick-and-mortar Wine Library.

It wasn't listed on Facebook or Upcoming. There was no badge check at the door. Heck, even the hotel didn't anticipate the hordes of geeks that would show up when Vaynerchuk and his guests Twittered the heck out of their fellow SXSWi attendees. (They kicked everyone out around 12:30 a.m.)

But it was one of those great, unexpected parties where nobody was getting turned away at the door, everybody seemed to know everybody, and everyone was having a fantastic time (apparently the game of choice among the Web 2.0 set is "Werewolf," which I knew as "Murder in the Dark" back in my junior high slumber party days) and there was no line at the bar because the "bar" consisted of Vaynerchuk standing on a chair and handing people bottles of wine with reckless abandon. One of the hottest conversation topics of the night was, understandably--why do SXSWi attendees bother with signing up to attend a zillion parties at the city's hottest nightclubs, when the highlight of the evening is an "underground" event in a hotel meeting room where everyone only knew about it because they'd heard on Twitter?

A word to the SXSWi-wise: don't get so obsessive-compulsive about making sure that guest list gets amassed from that online invitation. Sometimes the real fun doesn't get organized.

Not making plans is so totally Web 3.0.

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

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).

AUSTIN, Texas--If you run a social media site, from a blog to a virtual world to a network like Facebook, you're going to have to deal with angry users, and that's a fact of life.

Such was the theme of the discussion at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday afternoon called "Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting."

The all-female panel (a rarity in the tech world!) was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog IO9.com, and consisted of Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, Gina Trapani of fellow Gawker Media blog Lifehacker, and Jeska Dzwigalski of Linden Labs, creator of virtual world Second Life.

"What happens when people on a social network or who are part of some kind of Web service become disgruntled or pissed off with the people who are running that service, and how can they make themselves heard in a way that is effective and nondestructive?" Newitz asked semi-rhetorically. The hour-long panel aimed to touch upon both how users can effectively mobilize and how online community organizers can deal with it. Ultimately, it focused primarily on the latter.

Newitz explained that there are at least three very separate kinds of users revolts on social-media sites. First, she said, there are "anarchist-style pranks" like the one she once rigged on social news site Digg as fodder for a Wired magazine story. "I wanted to find out if I could buy votes on Digg and get something really stupid on the front page," she related, talking about how she paid a shady company to power a fake blog she created to the front page of Digg "to show how easy it would be to buy votes on Digg."

She also talked about "grassroots rebellions," like the mass chaos that ensued when Digg users posted the crack key for high-definition DVDs' digital rights management technology and the site's executives pulled it down. They then retracted their decision in the wake of user protests that crippled the site's servers. "I would call that a genuine grassroots result," Newitz said.

Finally, there are "high-profile people claiming to speak for a larger community in a public forum," like the open letter that a small group of Digg users posted to criticize new changes to the site and ultimately was part of the reason why executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose kicked off a series of "town hall" discussions with users. Alternately, there's the controversy over Facebook's Beacon advertisements that resulted in loads of high-profile press on behalf of liberal activist group MoveOn.org but ultimately flew under the radar of many of the huge social network's users.

"Second Life is kind of built for user revolts," Dzwigalski said, explaining that there are all kinds of rebellions in the virtual world, but that the most visible are the ideology-fueled demands like the "revolts" that took place in 2003 when Linden Labs attempted to tax Second Life users and the 2006 controversies over a piece of software called CopyBot in which many in-world retailers shut down their businesses for a day.

The overall gist of the panel seemed to indicate that user revolts can be extremely annoying and difficult to manage, but ultimately an important part of a social-media site's evolution. Dwsigalski said the CopyBot controversy "led to greater transparency from the company to the community because people were demanding to know how changes impacted the (Second Life) economy."

"We have this kind of hippie trust thing going on," Jessamyn West said of MetaFilter, a moderated group blog with 35,000 users that lets anyone contribute for a $5 registration fee. Since the community is overwhelmingly made up of young white males, sexism issues have become high-profile, from "I'd hit it" remarks about pictures of female users to more serious harassment issues that have caused some users to ditch the site entirely. "I wake up every morning and I tell boys on the Internet to stop calling each other names," West joked.

Most of the time, these user revolts never really go away. Sexism on MetaFilter, for example, remains controversial. "I have enemies on MetaFilter," West explained and said that she'd made a promise to change her MetaFilter username to the racy slang term "cooter" if the site went a month without any "I'd hit it" remarks. "That's been in place since November and I'm not worried," she said.

Trapani's account of a user revolt was a bit different; she talked about what happened when a toiled company bought ad space on Lifehacker. "Their ad campaign involved butts. Smiling butts," Trapani said bluntly, and said that she received several dozen e-mails from readers who weren't particularly happy about seeing, um, naked behinds. Many were concerned about what might happen if the ads showed up at the workplace or if readers' children happened to be within viewing distance.

Then discussion of the "smiling butts" started to overtake comment threads, and Trapani finally negotiated to have the ads removed from Lifehacker--though they remained on Gawker Media's racier sites. "We didn't feel good about mooning our readers all day long," Trapani commented.

Discussion briefly touched the debate surrounding the Anonymous hacker group, which has used many social media sites to promote an agenda critical of Scientology. West talked about that sort of debate on MetaFilter, and said that debate was welcome but that zealots who couldn't talk about anything else were not. "We had Tom Cruise's lawyers after once us," she said.

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

AUSTIN, Texas--Despite having plenty of blogging work still to do on Friday night, I decided to check out some of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival's notorious after-hours scene. Man, it's enough to give anyone a headache long before the aftereffects of the free drinks set in the next morning.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos (center) in a photo op with Mashable's Tamar Weinberg (left) and PaidContent's Joseph Weisenthal

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

Friday night promised to be the least party-heavy night of the week, with only one "official" party on the books: PR firm Porter Novelli's happy hour at the massive bar called Six Lounge. Probably because of the lack of other SXSWi parties, the line outside the door at Six soon stretched round the block and satellite soirees popped up at several other bars, like the zillion-beers-on-tap Ginger Man down the street. Nevertheless, the onslaught of Twitters and text messages saying that everyone should hit up a certain bar--or even more specifically, a certain floor of a certain bar--got really, really nuts. And if you left one bar for the next only to decide to go back, you had to hop back in line.

But the company was worth keeping. The most unexpected socializer of the night was arguably Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who said he wasn't in town to host a panel or make a high-profile appearance at SXSWi--he was just around to socialize and talk to people, which everyone seemed to think was pretty darn cool, and was also an effective strategy in convincing bloggers that it would be rude to ask him prying questions about Amazon.

Blog entrepreneurs and perpetual Valleywag gossip targets Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy)

Spotted at either Ginger Man or Six: uber-blogger Robert Scoble, Digg founder Kevin Rose (who told me in jest that his company doesn't have a buyer but is up for sale on eBay), WineLibrary.tv host Gary Vaynerchuk, PaidContent blogger Joseph Weisenthal, Gawker's Nick Douglas, AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill, Pownce co-founder Leah Culver, and a whole crew from social-networking blog Mashable, whose founder Pete Cashmore was passing out business cards and swag rather than dancing this time.

At least thus far, it appears that Twitter is the new Twitter. The microblogging service managed to hold up in the wake of Friday night's SXSWi activity, and was getting used nonstop across the board. But Saturday night's parties will be about an order of magnitude bigger, so we'll have to see if it manages to survive another evening out.

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