Facebook Graph Search

A couple of weeks back Mark Zuckerberg presented the latest feature in the Facebook arsenal Graph Search to the world. My question(s) is(are), REALLY? Actually when i saw parts of the presentation and read about it on various blogs I got several questions in my head,

1. The Chairman and CEO of a company which has current market valuation of about 100 billion USD gives a presentation from his Macbook on two tine-tiny projector screens, really? That is not CEO/Chairman mentality, that is not a presenter's mentality, that is a hacker's mentality at best. Though this hacker mentality might be a good thing for Facebook technically but it's downright stupid when it comes to the business world. But I am sure MZ is smart enough to know all this and yet do what he feels is good for the company or maybe it's just him satisfying his developer/designer ego. Either way Kudos to him for not caring about the money people and showing them their true place. Wall street has far too much control on American technology companies, I think that should stop at once for the good of humanity. If it doesn't stop at once the day is not far when some corporation will come up with desalination of sea-water and water will be more expensive than blood and oil for the sake of capitalism.

2. The feature itself, again really?? This is where I am not sure what is he trying to show the world, that is not really a feature, at least not a one that Facebook invented or has come up with anytime in the near past. That whole presentation is about running SQL like queries on a database albeit in English. All Facebook has done is make the world familiarized with SQL in layman terms, in terms of attributes and objects specific to Facebook. If this is innovation at Facebook and a new feature worth holding a press conference at your campus then companies like IBM, Intel, Apple, Sony, Qualcomm will have to hold press conferences on a daily basis to announce their daily work as "groundbreaking contribution to science". Come on MZ, you can do better than this, at least the computer science literates know very well you were selling such processed information to advertisers already and it is kid's (Computer Science kid) play to get that information from the database, now you are just throwing the common public an already eaten piece of meat and expecting them to relish it. The irony is collectively Facebook users are going to spend millions of hours using this "feature" to stalk, investigate, scan, scam, exploit and in occasional cases productive and/or meaningful use of this feature to gather information. If you look at Google's products or listen to Sergey Brin's interviews, intent is always on making human lives better whereas in my honest opinion Facebook's intents are not even remotely close to being so noble , for a company of such valuations and impact it can (should) do way better with its power and money.

3. I am not sure how to put this out there in the industry, but I think most CEOs should stop making presentations, keynotes and what not. Not all of you are Steve Jobs, hell none of you are Steve Jobs. Instead get a presenter who is really passionate about technology you are presenting (or can at least pretend well), who is really able to communicate to every (at least 60%) individual in the crowd and at least 60% of the people who are going to watch that video on Youtube. With a bad introductory presentation you have already killed the product in the eyes of the consumers and the technology journalists (ahem absolute dumbasses, pretend geeks/nerds) who sadly are going to influence the end consumers with their impressions of your presentations . When I look at presentations from CEOs of Mobile phone industry I can count at least a dozen disasters

       a. Sanjay Jha (Motorola Mobility)
       b. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft)
       c. Peter Chou (HTC)
       d. Stephen Elop (Nokia)
       e. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
       e. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) (probably the only guy with some quotient of saving grace in a list of failures)

And the list can just go on and on for a long time...

Ciao ...