Facebook fMC 2012: Keynote with Chris Cox #facebook ads

Facebook's Chris Cox shares the power of the social graph, authentic identify, and long term product vision.

now I'm really excited to introduce one
of the product visionaries of Facebook
and just a wonderful guy the VP of
Product Chris Cox
so the day I went in for my job
interview at Facebook in the winter of
2005 was one of the most surreal
weird and far-out few hours of my life I
rode my bike into downtown Palo Alto
where Facebook had just gotten a second
story office above a skateboarding shop
the company was 18 months old at that
time I was pretty skeptical that
Facebook was the real deal I didn't
think the company was run by serious
people I didn't think they had a serious
product I didn't think they were working
on a serious problem like most people in
the technology industry at the time the
homepage looked something like this
there was no newsfeed there was no rich
media there's no like buttons there were
no farms and when I got into the office
it was not this well-lit palatial
masterpiece there were no movie stars
running around JT was not there the
place I arrived in looked something like
this
I was completely overdressed I waited
there well nobody noticed me there were
water bottles and Donuts everywhere and
I sat there alone waiting for somebody
to pull their head up from their
computer and see me so one of Facebook's
co-founders Dustin Moskovitz sees that
I've arrived can tell from what I'm
wearing that I'm there for a job
interview and I didn't get a heads up on
the dress code and he takes me into this
corner office for what I thought was
going to be a job interview but what was
in fact him performing inception in the
form of giving me a super crisp super
cogent super visionary explanation of
what Facebook would be when it grew up
if you think about Facebook as a blue
and white college dating site you're
making a mistake if you look underneath
that what you will see is the seed of
the first ever collaboratively created
directory of people it's updatable and
accessible from anywhere each person is
responsible for his or her own
representation and we think this could
be a real
powerful service now back then on the
internet you could look up a lot of
stuff you could find stock quotes you
could go shopping you could play games
you could read the Library of Congress
from the Motorola RAZR in your pocket
but if you wanted to reconnect with
someone you'd lost touch with you had a
piece of technology that was pretty old
was woefully out of date and was
administered by a phone company
so the first Facebook profile was
designed to provide a directory answer
to the question of who is around me and
it was laid out as the first five
minutes of a conversation that you might
have with a stranger what's your name
how old are you where you're from where
did you grow up where do you study
followed by the next five minutes which
is who do we know in common are we in
any of the same classes and so on and so
on and so on and Dustin said to me
rather than thinking about these things
as just fields on a white page look at
each connection there as pieces of
connective tissue that unify everybody
that's involved in that thing this is
everybody from Puget Sound this is
everybody who likes the movie office
space this is everybody from Chicago who
lives in my dorm who's taking the same
anthropology classes me so I can find
people to study with and if you took
that seed of conversations and
connective tissue and projected it
forward you could see that the evolution
of this profile would just become more
and more powerful of a storytelling
platform providing more and more minutes
of that conversation you might have with
someone you were meeting for the first
time and beyond just getting deeper it
will get broader because at some level
every brand small restaurant local
business rock band and politician has
the same problem of being found and
being heard in a way that is reliable
and in a way that is up-to-date the most
recent chapter of this was an attempt to
provide an even bigger even more
creative and an even more interesting
canvas for this storytelling platform
extending from a handful of minutes out
to many hours of conversations you might
have over a latte what are the places
you've worked and been educated at tell
me about your close friend
and family show me cute photos of your
dog tell me about some of the amazing
places you've been and what you saw
there tell me about who inspires you
about who you listen to and who you read
and then tell me maybe about some of the
things you've been playing or watching
recently you add on top of that an
expansive photograph and the ability to
go back and find the history of any
person place or thing and you have this
big fat storytelling canvas that people
are starting to adopt and we're finding
to be really really exciting so Dustin
has me kind of trying to wrap my head
around this director idea growing
outwards in time and he says if you can
imagine that this web of people all
connected directly to the people places
and things that they care about you
realize that you have the foundation for
this amazing publishing platform for the
future we have an idea for this thing
called feed it would turn the homepage
into a stream of updates of what's going
on around each of these college kids
because right now when they come to the
homepage it looks like this so they go
and click around to the profiles of all
of their friends if any of you were on
Facebook in 2004 or 2005 you will
remember this to see if anything has
changed and this was incredibly
disappointing and inefficient because
you're reading through something that's
telling you what you already knew about
your closest friends hey I'm still from
Chicago and my favorite movies have not
changed he said this is kind of
inevitable if you think about it and he
pointed at the vision of the late great
media philosopher Marshall McLuhan who
foretold that the cost of communication
the speed of communication and the
resolution of the messages that we are
communicate are changing exponentially
fast in a way that we absolutely cannot
wrap our heads around because now rather
than taking hundreds of years they're
happening within our lifetime and the
timescales are compressing if you look
at the last hundred years versus the
last hundred thousand you'd see this
very quickly spreading web of
connectedness from The Telegraph to
commercial airline networks to the
internet and mobile phones
so one thing we can count on is that the
number of people with access to
publishing tools and the corpus of
published content is going to grow at a
rate that looks something like this
and is basically impossible to
anticipate so some company and he was
talking about them needs to start
anticipating how to help people find
what's interesting and all of the
information that's being produced so the
first version of newsfeed looked
something like this it was a pretty
rudimentary stream of updates of the
activity that was going on on Facebook
and since then other than 800 million
people joining the world has changed a
lot if he had told me back then that in
seven years every single person in this
audience would have in their pocket a
glowing touchscreen with two cameras a
gyroscope a GPS device a thin efficient
battery and a computer processor faster
than what most people had at that desk
on their desk at that time I probably
wouldn't have believed him
but that's exactly what has happened and
as a result the content in this personal
newspaper is becoming a lot more
meaningful and interesting moving beyond
college gossip and Facebook activity to
news articles political opinions major
life events like graduations weddings
and new babies and for some reason we
don't completely understand
lots and lots of pictures of food
seriously
so when you guys come to Facebook and
you say what can we do to participate in
this medium in a way that's super
organic and super natural and super rich
we're reminded that you guys have always
created the best content we have lying
around the office this 1931 edition of
Fortune magazine which is a really
amazing piece of print and as you flip
through it the things that stands out at
you is that the ads are by far the most
interesting the best designed the most
advanced the most professional and the
most far-reaching content in the
magazine
they're just far more interesting than
everything else and we expected on
Facebook that will become true as well
except that rather than large giant
spreads its super concise super
beautiful media and supporting these
really interesting discussions and we're
starting to see this happen from a lot
of those of you who are in the room
right now these gorgeous fashion photos
of Burberry these really witty
conversation pieces of coca-cola and a
lot of artists photographers and
musicians inviting people into their
private lives where apparently they
compose music from a hot tub on an iPad
overlooking a rain forest
from this particular artist who may or
may not be performing here at this
evening so if you have your head around
this massive expansive collaboratively
created directory and this newspaper
that you will carry on with you that is
interactive rich always up-to-date and
published directly by the set of people
that you care about there's only one
more thing that this company will work
on which is the ability to bring those
two things with you wherever you go
because going forward there's going to
be computers everywhere in your car in
your pocket at work on your phone on
your TV and they're all going to be
running software the current model for
most of that software is that you are
anonymous actor interacting with a
screen and to take the most obvious
interface watching my dad watch
television these days is a little bit
tedious because there's 999
channels in the model for figuring out
what to watch for a lot of people is
still clicking through the channels
until one find something that's
interesting and it's amazing to think
about that his neighbor's doing the same
thing and his son is doing the same
thing and his cousin is doing the same
thing and we're all sitting there alone
in front of these televisions flipping
through the channels trying to figure
out what to watch then going to work the
next morning and talking about at the
water cooler what we should recommend
and then going back rinsing and
repeating the same thing so we imagine
the kind of interfaces that could happen
if when he turned it on it just said 14
of your friends liked Entourage click
here your parents recorded 60 minutes
for you click here to watch it
you missed Meryl Streep's acceptance
speech everybody's talking about this
one part where she said this one thing
that everybody's laughing at click here
to watch it now and that's just the
television you can put the hat on that
imagines things this way and go look at
software and see some amazing things in
music now instead of just looking at
your own playlists when deciding what to
listen to
you're actually starting to see the
playlists of the people whose music
taste you care about rather than playing
minesweeper with a stranger from Estonia
you're starting to see people walking
around on the subway playing Scrabble
with their mom or dad and on
Ticketmaster
rather than trying to remember exactly
which night your friends were going to
the concert and exactly which seats they
were going to be in people can go see
that right there and then post back that
they're going which incidentally on
average creates six extra dollars have
spent for Ticketmaster so at that point
I was like alright this is not the
dating site that I thought it was but
the amazing thing about these is that
they're really really simple and they're
really really timeless they're gonna be
important problems for us to solve as a
community way after nobody knows what a
browser is anymore
so our vision for you guys is it an
interaction of any person on Facebook
with a brand is just as awesome just as
fast and just as rich as their
interactions with the people their
colleagues
and their family we're super excited you
guys could be here today there's a great
day a lot of awesome talks planned the
party tonight will be great so I want to
introduce Mike HOF flinger to tell you
guys about some new products thank you