A key part of Facebook's focus for the future is to keep pace with its users' increasing desire to share personal information, said Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.
"When we first started, people were relatively less comfortable sharing a lot of information. Early on there were a lot of questions, like 'should I put my full name on Facebook?' and 'should I put my mobile phone number on Facebook?', and a lot of what got people over that hump were privacy controls so they were sharing that information with just the people they wanted," said Zuckerberg in an on-stage chat with conference host and organiser Ryan Carson.
"When there was only a little information that people could post, people would update their profile maybe once a month or every couple of months. Then we added things like photos and groups and the updates became more regular like once a week, once every couple of days, and now with status updates and all the different applications that people are using, the rate is increasing so much. Now most people probably update stuff on a daily basis."
Zuckerberg believes sharing is growing exponentially: "One of the things that we have thought about at Facebook - we don't have any conclusions on it yet - but an interesting historical analogy is Moore's Law." (The Law stated that the speed of processors would double every two years.) "And I wouldn't be surprised, although there's no definitive link yet, if something like that exists with the rate of sharing."
Facebook's recent redesign was in response to that idea, Zuckerberg revealed, and there's more to come in future versions of Facebook: "Part of the redesign that we did was to reorganise the display of things to support the growth in sharing, and more and more parts of the site will start to be reorganised in terms of that."
