"Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We're not thinking about ourselves as a community — we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections."

Time - The Future of Facebook

"He dropped out of Harvard in 2004, where he was intending to study psychology. His mom is a psychiatrist, his dad's a dentist. Zuckerberg was a computer whiz early on, writing software in sixth grade. In his second year at Harvard he built a site where students could rate, or berate, the looks of classmates through ID photos he lifted off Harvard's computers."

"'You got into deep trouble from this little prank,' Stahl remarks."

"'Well, Harvard was just not happy that I was using their images,' Zuckerberg says."

"'Well, they said you hacked,' Stahl says. 'Did they punish you?'"

"'Yeah, I was put on some sort of -- I don't know what you call it,' Zuckerberg says."

"'Probation?' Stahl asks."

"'Sure,' Zuckerberg says."

"Soon thereafter, he and his two roommates created an online version of the Harvard student directory where kids could message each other. They called it 'The Facebook' and launched it from their dorm room. Within four months they had expanded to 40 colleges, and over the summer moved to Palo Alto."

60 Minutes - The Face Behind Facebook

Granular control over degrees of openness are vital to making openness viable, Zuckerberg told me today. He said people have been trained to believe that there is a binary set of options concerning privacy and sharing of data: that some things are sharable and others are not.

"Take a photo album from a party," he said. "Unless you have specific tools to limit who can see it, then you won't share it with anyone." If users have granular control over who is able to access shared data, Zuckerberg argued, then whole classes of information previously considered unsharable could be opened up. Those tools, he said, need to be simple enough for non-power users to use them easily.

When that information is opened, though, which parts of it are sharable and which aren't?

"If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends' news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there's no longer any control over the data for users."

Hopefully these aren't deal breakers on openness. Privacy controls are integral to the core of Facebook, Zuckerberg pointed out. "That's the vector around which Facebook operates." In order for data portability to become a reality within the privacy-centric context of Facebook, he said, there need to be good answers to questions like these. Zuckerberg says Facebook is actively working on answering those questions.

ReadWriteWeb Interview - SxSW:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mark_zuckerberg_on_data_portab.php