“I want to clear my life so I have to make as few decisions as possible beyond serving this community,” Zuckerberg said.
Responding to a question during a town hall discussion with about 200 users at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, he compared his choice to the simplicity practised by President Obama and the late Steve Jobs of Apple.
The event, said the New York Times, also featured questions sent to Zuckerberg via the Facebook social network. It was webcast live and was the first in what he said would be a regular series of conversations with Facebook users. ,
He reiterated his determination to add high-quality, free phone calls to the list of services that Facebook provides — a plan the phone companies may not like..
“Free calling is certainly something that we’re focused on,” he said — as is delivering Internet service from satellites and high-flying planes.
He defended the company’s decision this year to force its users to install a separate mobile app, called Messenger, if they wanted to keep sending instant messages on the service. “Asking everyone in our community to install another app was a big ask,” he said. “We really believe this is a better experience.”
Why doesn't the news feed show everything posted by the friends and company pages that a person follows? “As time goes on, people are sharing more and more things on Facebook,” he said. “There’s just more competition,” said Zuckerberg.
He also discussed one of Facebook’s big failures last year: the aborted rollout of a new look for the Facebook news feed on desktop computers that featured much bigger photos and images.
He said the company had made the changes in response to complaints that the design of the news feed felt outdated. “It was really ugly. People would say, ‘This feels like a website from 1990,’ and that hurt,” he said.
But the new design was crafted by Facebook engineers using 26-inch monitors. They failed to appreciate that most people use much smaller screens, so the new Facebook feed showed them only one or two items a screen.
“It gave us a blind spot to the computers that most people are using in the world,” he said. The millions of users in the test group rebelled, using Facebook less, and the company scaled back the changes before rolling them out globally.
He said the company was working hard to diversify its work force, in particular to bring in more women as programmers. He said it was challenging because too few girls are interested in computer science.
He was asked what he thought about the accuracy of “The Social Network,” a 2010 film about Facebook’s founding that made him into a household name.
“I kind of blocked that one out,” he said. “They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.”
Zuckerberg advised aspiring entrepreneurs in the room: “You need to have grit to see things through.” If the Facebook movie had portrayed the real story of the company’s founding, he said, “it would have been of me sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight.”