Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

More on Facebook…

Actually, I got nothing today!

Well, not true, as the stuff I have is still baking in the journalistic oven.

facebook

But, be assured, I will keep busy ferreting out more info about what’s going on at the social-networking site, which is much in the news and on magazine covers of late.

This week, the internal corporate life of Facebook got some attention, after I reported that its COO Owen Van Natta’s title changed to chief revenue officer and vice president of operations.

(And I also did a primer on its manly–literally–executive team.)

manilow

My Facebook travails include haranguing its very patient PR head Brandee Barker until she hands over CEO and Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg to BoomTown for one of our withering cross-examinations, which will surely include the incessant playing of my greatest hits compilation of Barry Manilow (as I have said before, I am a Fanilow!) until he gives it up.

And what do I want to know? Given that Mark is relatively new to this press thing, I am providing five of many many queries here, in no particular order, after the jump:

  1. What exactly is the state of your relationship with Microsoft and why is Bill Gates a reported idol of yours? Would they make a good owner for Facebook, if you decided to sell?
  2. How are you going to manage Facebook going forward? With Van Natta, who has had a lot of the company reporting to him, now in a different role, are you ready to have all those direct reports and really take on the job as CEO?
  3. What are the biggest challenges facing Facebook? Privacy? Copyright? Scalability? Lack of truly significant ad sales? A possibility that the bright and shiny service won’t look quite as bright or as shiny in a year?
  4. Is it true that Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns your much larger rival MySpace, has been nosing around your business, if not to buy then to what?
  5. tomsawyerfence

  6. When will this widgetmania stop and is it just a cheap (and clever, Mark, very clever, just like Tom Sawyer and that fence whitewashing scheme) way of building a newfangled portal out of Facebook? Speaking of portals–we know now you dinged former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel when he arrived a while back with a bag of cash to buy Facebook–but what would you do if you were at that company right now? Because someday you might be.

Oh, I have a lot more, Mark, and the rest of you over there in Palo Alto (and I mean you, Chamath, Matt, Gideon and also VC guys Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel–but not so much Dustin and Adam, as discussing servers and site architecture, while important, makes me very sleepy). I’ll be waiting by the iPhone for your call.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work