Facebook founder admits mistakes

Mark Zuckerberg gave his first interview since Facebook's May IPO at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. He admitted the mistakes made and explained that now the company will pay more attention to mobile device users.

In his first interview after Facebook's IPO in May of this year, which Mr. Zuckerberg gave to the TechCrunch portal, the creator of the social network said that he was disappointed with changes in the company's share price, which has more than halved since May. However, many, in his opinion, underestimate the company.

In addition to his disappointment, Mr. Zuckerberg also spoke about how he sees the future of his company. The future belongs to mobile technologies, Mr. Zuckerberg said, “it is in this direction that we should develop, because now more than half of the 950 million Facebook users use the social network from mobile devices. In the long term, he said, there will be more money to be made from mobile device users than from desktop users. The opportunity here is enormous, “over the next 3 to 5 years, the most important question will be how successfully we can develop in the mobile space,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

The founder of Facebook admitted that a big strategic mistake was relying on creating Internet platforms for the iPhone and smartphones with the Android operating system instead of developing applications for them. At the moment, mobile applications have already been created for iPhone, and will soon be released for Android.

Another promising area, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, is search technology. Facebook is interested in Google's search technologies. The company already receives billions of search queries per day.

Mr. Zuckerberg denied information about Facebook creating its own smartphone. “That would be a completely wrong strategy for us,” he said.

Facebook shares rose 3.3% after the interview.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya

Mark Zuckerberg is disappointed