Interview with Mark Zuckerberg

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, recently interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They talked about a variety of topics, but there were a couple things that were interesting. Facebook has but a lot of investment behind its platform and it recently launched its Facebook Connect service which we wrote about. Zuckerberg talks about the ways he views first party applications verses third party applications.

Zuckerberg says, “There’s this big question about whether we’ll compete with applications. The approach that we take isn’t that there’s some rule that we won’t compete with applications, but we just think that in general it’s not good for us to.”

What he is really saying is I will build first party applications when it’s in Facebook’s best interest. Anything that is really, really important to the community will be strategic to Facebook. Like music, Zuckerberg goes on to confirm that Facebook is working on a music application. He justifies it by saying, “To make a really good music application you have to have access to music. We felt like we had a good chance of helping someone negotiate to get access to the music necessary to create a good music application.” There are plenty of companies that they could have partnered with to get access to music. But they are building an application because they think it strategic to Facebook for a variety of reasons.