Facebook to put ‘people first’, looks to grow its mobile reach

San Francisco: Mark Zuckerberg, like Facebook, is maturing. The soon-to-be 30-year-old chief executive of the decade-old social networking company grew reflective as he stood before hundreds of app developers to announce a host of mobile features designed to put “people first.”

“We used to have this famous mantra, ‘move fast and break things,’” Mr Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco. But moving quickly was sometimes so important that Facebook’s engineers would tolerate a few bugs, or push out products that were not always fully baked. Fixing the bugs, Mr Zuckerberg said, “was slowing us down.”

Backpedaling on features that didn’t work — or that users didn’t like — slowed things, too, though he did not mention that.

Mr Zuckerberg pointed to a new sign that read “Move fast with stable infra,” as in infrastructure, and the audience laughed. Stability, it turns out, is the new maxim, and the era of breaking things is over.

In a rare bit of onstage rumination reflecting on the past decade, Mr Zuckerberg said he and other Facebook employees realised they had created a culture of quick-witted, fast-moving engineers who took pride in being “hackers” who consistently put the company’s best interests ahead of what users wanted.

Now, he says, the goal is “to build a culture of loving the people we serve that is as strong if not stronger than our culture of hacking at Facebook. I hope you can see the seeds of some of this today in what we are talking about.”

Facebook’s focus is now squarely on the mobile space, not just its own applications but those built by outside developers.