Facebook Developer Garage in Paris with Mark Zuckerberg

I attended yesterday night the Facebook Developer Garage event in Paris, and had the opportunity to see Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. That was the first time Mark was coming to Paris, and of course the first time I had the chance to meet with him. I have to thank a lot Phil Jeudy for having sent me the invitation. It has been actually a great occasion to meet some of the French people I met in San Francisco last year while they were on their Geek trip. I also think about Francois Xavier Tanguy, a great person who launched Dreamshake.com, a web 2.0 services which help you to fulfill your dreams.

First of all, I want to  speak a little bit about the venue: La Cantine. The location is very hard to find, in a very small street of Paris. But actually, the venue was very nice, and was well adapted to the mixer that happened after the speech of Mark. Prior to the Facebook's boss presentation, there were couple of people that introduced their Facebook application, including netvibes. I'll talk about them some other times.

I would like to speak mainly about the "star" of the night, Mark Zuckerberg. I did not really know what to expect as I don't think I have ever seen any videos of him. He is a very young person. He might have the same age than me (maybe even older), but I look like I have 10 years more, especially with my beard know. To be totally honest with you, I have been a little bit disappointed. Mark did not have prepared any kind of presentations, he talked briefly about Facebook, and then  dedicate time to questions.  Mark is for sure not Steve Jobs. He doesn't have much charisma. So added to the fact there was no real presentation, I did not find what I was looking for.

However, the great plus is that he is very easy to talk with. He spent hours to talk to different French developers, and was very friendly with them. I have highly appreciated his availability.

What's up with Facebook? Thanks to questions we still have been able to get valuable information. Especially, the fact that Facebook is working on geolocation for mobile devices, which will help you to know where your friends are at and interact better with them. I think this is a good news. However, this work is difficult as Facebook did not develop any kind of mobile platform, since it is third parties that developed the cell phones and mobile versions of Facebook.

Also, some news about how they have created the New Facebook. They have noticed (and most of the users too I believe) that most of the widgets that people have installed on their pages weren't used, and that it made it difficult to get the information of someone out of the page because of it. With the new version, they are focusing on information feeds of your community, and show up more about the activities of your friends than their widgets that most of the time people don't use after a week or two. The main idea is to highlight people's actions.

PS:@Kate, I am sorry, you see, I wrote this one in English...