Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Red Bull Alert for Facebook Engineers: Mark Zuckerberg Promises Many More Feature Launches Coming Soon to a Social Network Near You!

During his introduction of Facebook’s Places geo-location offering yesterday afternoon, like any good geek on launch day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hopping excitedly onstage about the rollout and promised more to come in the months ahead.

“We have a lot of other interesting launch nights coming out this summer,” he said to the crowd of media gathered in the decked-out cafeteria of the social networking behemoth’s HQ in Palo Alto, Calif.

Since summer is ending in a few weeks, he and I had a short chat after the presentation about exactly what that meant.

“This is just the start of a lot more to come, because I think it’s important that we bring out as many features and innovations as quickly as we can,” said Zuckerberg, whose kinetic demeanor appeared to be channeling a 12-pack of energy drinks.

He talked about a start-up night, as well as one devoted to Facebook’s recently released beta Questions product, which he said he thinks could be massive.

The feature, like Yahoo Answers or Quora, gives users the ability to get answers to their questions from friends and even the larger community.

“The way we do search right now doesn’t address exactly what people might be looking for,” said Zuckerberg. “Instead of messing around on Web pages, someday, you should put a request into a phone and have it beep with the right answer.”

I don’t think Zuckerberg was meaning to delivering a specific smack upside the head to Google (GOOG)–he must like the search giant a little since he has hired so many of its employees–although that’s the market that Facebook is aiming at, of course.

And, indeed, it’s aimed changing how search is done, using a smart melding of people knowledge and deep troves of data to deliver more than the brute-force results consumers get now via search.

Zuckerberg declined to name what else was up–“We have not made that public yet”–but it’s good to see a founder so engaged, in the style of Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL), Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN) and also, of course, the Google twins, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

While Facebook was clearly riding in the wake of the innovation of others in geo-location–such as Foursquare–with its Places entry, the race might not always be to the swift.

In fact, Zuckerberg seems to be hoping it is to the pretty fast and very steady.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik