Facebook’s privacy policy changes have been nudging people towards a more public persona for some time now. So it’s interesting that Facebook’s director of product engineering, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, is focusing more on the personal and “real friends”.
“We are interested in making it easier for people to interact in a very deep, meaningful way with the people they care the most about,” he says, referencing the recent video chat and standalone Messenger mobile app.
“At the same time we want to fill out the opportunities people have to interact with brands, with celebrities, with people they want to know more from but maybe aren’t friends with.”
This week’s new Twitter-style Subscribe button fits firmly into the latter camp.
Boz, who created the news feed, was in London on Thursday to speak at Facebook Studio Live, an ad-industry “hackathon” which saw more than 400 creative types decamp from Soho to east London.
The event, in a former brewery, was bedecked in Facebook sloganeering: “Done is better than perfect”; “Fail harder”; “Move fast and break things”; and, twisting the recently revived British wartime poster, “Keep calm and hack on”.
Boz and other senior Facebookers, including Mark D’Arcy, director of global creative solutions, urged the attending admen to adopt their own “hacker culture”.
“Hacking is an approach to problem solving which essentially says: there exist avenues of solving problems that are unexpectedly effective,” says Boz. “It’s a mentality of never being comfortable – an exhortation that we should alway be prepared to sacrifice good in the pursuit of great.”
Unfortunately, Boz wouldn’t go into much detail on next week’s f8, other than to say it will be the “biggest yet”. “There are one or two things that are real leaps forward – it’s going to be big,” he says.
More in the AudioBoo interview below, starting with his anticipation of f8′s announcements.
