Last time Facebook met a UK government minister, it was enduring tabloid hell after a 17-year-old girl was murdered by a man she met through the social network.
Today saw what seems to have been a much more amicable meeting.
Mark Zuckerberg, who began his trip to Europe yesterday at a London Facebook “hackathon”, this morning met with David Cameron, the prime minister, and Jeremy Hunt, secretary of state for culture and media.
Mr Hunt tweeted that the 26-year-old was a “really smart guy with some good ideas on improv[ing] digital culture in policy making”, in spite of apparently showing up to meet the British government in hoodie and jeans.
Addressing developers later in the day, Facebook’s founder praised the UK’s “open data” initiative, launched by Tim Berners-Lee in January under the previous Labour government.
“David Cameron was busy today, I guess with his budget stuff going on tomorrow,” joked Mr Zuckerberg of his trip to “Number 10 Downing”. “He and his team seem very insightful.”
Mr Zuckerberg said he and the cabinet were “excited” by what he saw being worked on at Sunday’s hackathon, the first official developer day to be held outside California.
“One of the things that surprised me was how many of the folks there were working on civic or public-minded concepts,” he said.
Examples included one of the first services to take advantage of Transport for London’s new data-sharing policy, which alerted people attending Facebook events whether there was disruption on the London Underground system that might impede their journey.
Another project which Mr Zuckerberg discussed with the PM was a site called “Together We Can”, which developer Tom Gallagher describes as a utility to “help communities help themselves”.
The site will use Facebook information about people in a community and allows them to attract support for and manage a local cause or project, such as tidying up a park or tackling unruly neighbours.
This is exactly the sort of thing Mr Cameron has been advocating in his “big society” concept, and Mr Zuckerberg encouraged his audience to keep on making useful, community-spirited applications that will nudge the government to open up more data.
European developers seem to have impressed the Facebook founder.
More than 300,000 sites have implemented Facebook’s social plug-ins – such as the universal “Like” button – since they were unveiled six weeks ago at f8. “A disproportionate amount of that [development] is coming from startups in Europe”, Mr Zuckerberg said, with almost half of all the “likes” on third-party sites coming from here.
He and his colleagues Joanna Shields, who now leads the European business, Ethan Beard, platform director, and Christian Hernandez, in charge of international partnerships, all pledged to do more to support developers outside the US.
“We are based out of Palo Alto, we spend most of our time there, and it’s easy for us to lose track” of the world beyond, Mr Zuckerberg said. “Most of our developers are not in the US.”
Mr Zuckerberg also seemed to plead for more patience from the outside world from a company which he repeatedly referred to as “pretty small” and in its “early days”.
“In one sense, the company has this pretty big footprint,” he said, as Facebook closes in on 500m members worldwide. “But in another sense it’s really small.”
The Facebook platform – home to 1m developers – is operated by just 30 engineers, while the team running the wildly popular Chat feature – one of the biggest instant-messaging services in the world – just hired its second member.
“A lot of the stuff that’s fun about what you guys do, building something quickly and scaling it up, that is what we do too,” Mr Zuckerberg told developers at the Barbican Centre.
Whether that’s quite the same pitch he’ll be making to advertisers – who love Facebook’s vast reach – at the Cannes Lions festival on Wednesday remains to be seen. But at least the prime minister is friends with Facebook now.
