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When the staid establishment program 60 Minutes invited Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for an interview, some in the blogosphere reacted as if there were some sort of age boundary that would prevent anything representing legacy media from being interested in the youthful Zuckerberg. Others were quick to report the big scoop that Zuckerberg said that Facebook would not go public, at least in 2008. And then there were those who couldn't help noticing that Zuckerberg is such a regular guy in spite of his $15 billion in spending money.
Sally Falkow blogs at The Leading Edge about PR Technology Trends. She had an opinion about the May–December hookup between 60 Minutes and Facebook:
60 Minutes’ audience is certainly not the young and hip, yet they see Facebook as something their viewers should know about.
The number of U.S. adults over age 50 will soar over the next ten years. In fact, U.S. Census Bureau data shows that 50+ adults will be the only growth demographic — measured by age — between now and 2015 as the massive Baby Boomer generation enters its 50s and 60s. And Baby Boomers account for more than half of U.S. spending, and the older they get the deeper their pockets.
Boomers are gowing online in growing numbers too. 70 percent of adults age 50 to 64 are online, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project,
While older Boomers use portals and banking sites, younger Boomers — age 40 to 49 — are much more attracted to niche websites, blogs, multimedia and social networking applications.
The Founder of Facebook may be only 23 but the users span the age spectrum from college kids to Baby Boomers.
I could go into an entire polemic here about the term Baby Boomers and the implicit assumption that no elder over the age of 64 is online, but I'll save that for another discussion.
At The League of Maternal Justice The Boob Squad have had issues with Facebook before (remember the breast feeding photo fiasco on Facebook?). They don't seem be warming up to Zuckerberg because of this interview:
While the 60 Minutes interview stated that "Zuckerberg seems to have made one savvy business decision after the next", and Charlene Li (blogger at Silicon Valley Moms Blog) of Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm, asserted that "Facebook is a threat to Google because it could become the first site people go to, to search", it's clear that Zuckerberg has made a few mis-steps - the biggest of which being Beacon.
Beacon was a program that tracked Facebook user purchases at dozens of online locations and made that information available to those users' friends - without seeking explicit permission beforehand. In the wake of this perceived privacy violation, "criticism of Beacon began to build, but Zuckerberg dug in his heels, until he had a full blown PR disaster on his hands."
Zuckerberg is also faced with a lawsuit filed by other former Harvard students, claiming that he has based Facebook on both ideas and code originally created for them. But he's not concerned, because "we have lawyers at the company who deal with that stuff."
Finally, despite the company's alleged value of $15B (based on Microsoft's purchase of 1.6% of Facebook for $240M), "Facebook has yet to figure out how to make money off its huge audience." As Zuckerberg admitted in his interview, "we have 400 employees and you know, I mean, we have to support all that and make a profit."
Kara Swisher, in her blog at All Things Digital also had some reservations about Facebook and Zuckerberg. She was interviewed on the program. First she had to list some disclaimers:
No surprise, Stahl asked if I was biased because of my partner, the Google exec (see my voluminous disclosure about that and more here), and because Rupert Murdoch now owned both Facebook rival MySpace and Dow Jones (owner of this site).
Well, no to both, since I was slapping around Facebook long before Google declared Open Social war on it and also before News Corp. was our corporate pooh-bah (also, the idea of me doing Rupe’s social-networking dirty work is laughable).
Once she cleared the air about her ethics as a commenter, she said,
But most of the interview was about the many challenging issues I and others have raised about Facebook. In her lean-forward style, Stahl asked me a range of questions, mostly having to do with my many pieces on the start-up and Zuckerberg.
An old pro at the shake-up game, she noted at the start that
