In one of his most accomplished and assured public interviews, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, predicted a social revolution over the next five years.
“Almost every major product vertical’s going to get rethought to be social. Get on the bus!” he told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
Mr Zuckerberg, who has often been hesitant and flustered in interviews in the past, issued a rallying cry to both entrepreneurs and major companies such as Apple, which launched its Ping social network in iTunes recently.
“Over the next five years, most industries are going to get rethought to be social and designed around people,” he said.
“You’re going to have incumbents embracing this, like Apple’s doing in pushing social stuff into iTunes, or there’ll be some really creative entrepreneur with great engineers who are building and rethinking the experience from scratch, and I think it’s going to be a really exciting period to see how this plays out.”
Mr Zuckerberg said games had been “the first big vertical to tip” with a social gaming company like Zynga growing on Facebook and becoming worth more than established video game publisher Electronic Arts.
Content such as music, movies, TV, news could be next, he said, leaving open the question of how Facebook would exploit this.
“We should play a role in helping to reform and rethink all those industries and we’ll get value proportional to what we put in,” he said.
In gaming, for example, Facebook earned revenues from social gaming companies buying ads to promote their games on its service and from their use of the Facebook Credits virtual currency, he told interviewers and conference organisers John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly.
Mr Zuckerberg said more than 50 per cent of Facebook’s 500m-plus members were using the service every day and this proportion was growing with the increase in mobile access to the service.
