NowPublic@SXSW2008: Zuckerberg Keynote Train Wreck

It finally happened. It is the flashpoint of the festival so far. It's everywhere. You can actually hear, see, and feel people talking, twittering, moblogging, yapping, snapping, and gossiping about it.

Yes, the event of the day today has been, without question, the train wreck of an hour that had promised to be Sarah Lacy's probing interview with Facebook CEO and web-prodigy Mark Zuckerberg.

To an assembled audience of thousands in the room, hundreds in satellite spaces on-site who received the live audio/video feed, and the countless others who tracked live updates, posts, streamed video, and minute-by-minute tweets, Mark Zuckerberg bravely sat and re-iterated his mission statement through a set of utterly banal, overly general and fawning pseudo-questions mixed with semi-flirtatious shlock that failed to yield anything of interest or of note.

Well, perhaps not anything, but certainly far far less than was expected and hoped for.

Or was this, perhaps, the outcome everyone had been hungering after?

Many, such as myself, had likely never seen or heard Zuckerberg speak other than in his defensive and robotic televised 60 Minutes interview several months ago. For them, as for me, the keynote offered a rare opportunity to get a more intimate, up close and personal sense of what both he, and his 15 billion dollar online "social utility", are really all about.

Instead, this is what we endured:

Oh, but the audience failed to agree. In fact their dissent and dissatisfaction was palpable all the way through the interview, until it finally erupted in a blitz of audience interjections, laughter, and grumblings that ended up concluding the interview. 

Although Zuckerberg failed to shake his robot-corporate armour and really speak frankly or from the heart, he managed to fare far better than his interviewer, Sarah Lacy, who has been lambasted and attacked all across the Twitterverse:

Throughout the keynote, disgruntled murmurs and scoffs grew ever-louder, as Lacy failed to engage Zuckerberg in any kind of a meaningful way and, instead, allowed the conversation to wander into highly questionable and bizarre territory.

From how the recently launched Facebook in Spanish has supposedly facilitated revolutionary networking and action in Columbia "against the guerilla armies" to how the site has somehow preposterously prevented loyal Lebanese users from becoming terrorists by allowing " them to develop a broader understanding of what's going on in the world"; Zuckerberg made broad and undefined claims about the relevance and importance of his product.

What he failed to do, however, was to repeat anything other than his mantra-like, mission catch phrases: we just trying to enable people to connect and communicate more efficiently.   

Fair enough, but what about privacy concerns? What about data mining issues? What did Zuckerberg have to say about a developing a technology that has fundamentally changed the way we interact and is fast-approaching a level of global ubiquitousness?

Well, the conversation didn't really go there.

We learned that Facebook is launching tonight in France (and French).  We learned there is no news on the Facebook music front, though some early inquiries have been made. We learned that as a $15 billion company, Facebook "doesn't necessarily focus on the financials". And we learned that Zuckerberg has voluntarily assumed, and seems to feel it necessary to embrace, the role of CEO, "to help [his] people keep their eye on the goal" which is, unsurprisingly to [insert mission statement here].

THE AFTERMATH

What is fascinating about the keynote, of course, is not the event itself, but its aftermath.

If Zuckerberg had been offered more substantive questions perhaps he would have offered more in-depth answers, which might have been satisfactory enough for the keynote to pass as midly interesting.

But that it was incomprehensibly boring, frustrating and annihilatingly self-serving/screwing on the part of Lacy (who we learned is writing a book on Zuckerberg that we can all pre-order on Amazon), made it worth something to everyone here, by giving them something to talk about

We all love watching the slow-motion car crash as it happens; the sublimely horrific Lord of the Flies moments that unfold before us as the ravenous masses turn on their weakest members. Unfortunately for the pandering Sarah Lacy, this year's SXSW contingent was hungry for something that was this infuriatingly uninteresting, and they clearly set their sights on her oblivious form. They moved in for the kill. Only this time, the hyenas, jackals, and vultures were armed with mobile phones, laptops, cameras, and moblogging accounts. 

But the smell of the fresh kill still lingers.