Twitter And The Mark Zuckerberg Interview

When I arrived 15-minutes into wrote later that she walked out in disgust. Susan Bratton was so disappointed that “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” wrote a post, saying this was nothing more than a witch burning

Some other analysis: Jemima Kiss in the Guardian’s blogs: Zuckerberg interview: What went wrong

Brian Solis spent five hours with Lacy after the interview and did a bunch more reporting before Kara Swisher would have reported it and she would have been invited to have been there. We also knew that Zuckerberg probably would be boring (he reminds us of Bill Gates who, despite giving speeches for 30 years, is still boring). The expectations on Zuckerberg are so high now, that he’d have to do something like Ballmer’s Monkey Boy dance to meet them.

2. The muttering continues, even last night. In fact, one woman, who I won’t name here, is going to moderate a panel discussion today and she told me “I hope I don’t pull a Lacy.” Overall, now that the emotion is out of it for the most part, people are still saying this was an interview gone bad and are disappointed that Lacy lashed out at the audience instead of trying to figure out what they wanted.

3. Zuckerberg himself, yesterday, realized that he didn’t answer the questions the audience wanted to have answered, so he did a “redo” of the interview, Gary Vaynerchuk or Guy Kawasaki. In fact, Zuckerberg is a geek who is far more comfortable talking about memcache or architectures than he is in answering questions for the press, or being in front of audiences (although I thought he stepped up his game in yesterday’s Q&A quite a bit). He reminds me a LOT of Bill Gates. I remember meeting Bill Gates at a conference party in the mid-1990s and couldn’t get him to be social, but when I switched to talking to him about compilers he got very passionate and went on for 20 minutes about the topic. Same with Zuckerberg. He really isn’t that comfortable talking about his business, or other things, but when you start digging into him technically he comes alive.

7. Zuckerberg is also a tough interview cause he gives PR answers. Now we know one other guy who does that: Steve Ballmer. But notice how Guy Kawasaki gets Ballmer to knock it off in This wasn’t the only audience revolt at SXSW this year

9. The audience at SXSW is quite unlike any other. These are people who blog and Twitter and Facebook and Meebo and use tons of other social networking tools. They also are snarky and are used to being heard (egotistical, even, just like your friendly local blogger). So, when they are in audiences here they expect to be part of the event. Most speakers here know this, and take advantage of the interactive demands (I was watching Twitter and videoing my own panel yesterday, so I knew when our panel was getting boring, or wasn’t on track with what the audience wanted). Most speakers here take the pulse of the audience often and early, going to questions and such. I wouldn’t speak here if you haven’t attended before. Also, this is not a business audience. Most of us really don’t care whether Zuckerberg is worth $1 or $15 billion. We want to know what Facebook’s developer platform is going to do. Or how Facebook is going to give us more control over our privacy. Or, how Facebook is going to make our data portable (I asked Zuckerberg about my getting kicked off of Facebook yesterday in his QA session and several attendees came up to me afterward saying they were happy someone finally asked Zuckerberg about that).

Anyway, I’m sure we could continue discussing this for a long time, but I have to prepare for we’ll go for BBQ with about 100 people. I hope Sarah comes along, we’ll break bread. Either way, we can fit about 120 people in, so meet us there. Afterward we’ll go to the RockBand party (wait until you see the video I participated in!) and then onto the Digg party.