SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Mark Zuckerberg, like Facebook, is
maturing. The soon-to-be 30-year-old CEO of the 10-year-old social
networking company grew reflective as he stood in front of hundreds of
developers to announce a host of mobile features designed to put "people
first."
"We used to have this famous mantra, ‘move fast and break
things," Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in San
Francisco.
But moving quickly was sometimes so important that
Facebook’s engineers would tolerate a few bugs, or push out products
that were not always fully baked. Fixing the bugs, Zuckerberg said, "was
slowing us down." Backpedaling on features that didn’t work —or that
users didn’t like— slowed things, too, though Zuckerberg did not mention
that.
Facebook’s new mantra may not be as sexy. Zuckerberg
pointed to a new sign that read "Move fast with stable infra," as in
infrastructure, and the audience laughed.
The last time Facebook
held a developer conference was in 2011. That was before the company
went public in 2012, before it began showing mobile advertisements and
before it paid eye-popping amounts of money to acquire small, popular
apps like Instagram and WhatsApp.
In the tech world, three years
can be a lifetime. Facebook’s focus is now squarely on the mobile world,
not just its own applications but those built by outside developers.
As
part of its mobile, people-first focus, Facebook says it will let users
log in to apps anonymously, without sharing their identities and
personal information with mobile applications they don’t trust.
Facebook’s
1.28 billion users can already use a "log in with Facebook" button to
sign up for apps that let them listen to music, play games, read the
news and monitor fitness activities. But using the button allows apps to
access information related to the Facebook user’s identity.
With
the anonymous login, Facebook will have information about users but the
apps won’t. Facebook says the feature will let more people to try out
new apps.
The company is also launching more granular controls
that let people determine the types of information they share with apps
when they want to use their Facebook identity to log in.
Facebook
also took the wraps off
its long-awaited mobile advertising network,
called "Audience Network," which allows it to serve ads to outside
mobile applications, not just its own. This will increase its
competition with Google, which currently dominates the mobile
advertising market.
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