Today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, Inside Network’s Justin Smith sat down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. The two talked about a bunch of things going on with the company. But to kick things off, Taylor offered up a bit of an overview about how 2010 went with regard to the Platform.
In 2010, Facebook’s focus was on user experience, Taylor said. He noted that while everything we growing “like gangbusters”, they had to do some things that weren’t taken as purely positive from a developer perspective. One big thing there is obviously the removal of what Facebook considers to be spam. “There was a lot of spam,” Taylor noted. But this past year they were able to cut spam by 95 percent.
Yes, 95 percent.
How did Facebook do this? Thanks to automated systems that Facebook built and put in place throughout the year. Taylor credits this as being the key factor in spam reduction despite the fact that the social network cut the number of Platform policies in half.
“We’re really happy with the 95 percent,” Taylor said noting again that the mixture of helping developers while reducing spam was a key focus for the entire year.
And while he did acknowledge some community push back, he pointed to huge success stories like CityVille, which was able to grow to 100 million users in 40 days despite new systems in place. It took Facebook itself 4 years to get to 100 million users. It took Microsoft 10 years to do that, Taylor noted.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Bret Taylor was the CTO of Facebook. He joined Facebook as the head of platform in August 2009, after serving as the co-founder and CEO of the social network aggregator FriendFeed. He most recently worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, where he began to develop FriendFeed with Jim Norris. During his four years at Google, he led more than 25 successful product launches, including Google Maps, Google Local, Google Web Toolkit, the Google Maps API, and...
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