SAN JOSE USA: Facebook does innovation to serve “everyone” in the community and not just the “high end,” said founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an apparent swipe at Snapchat boss’ reported “poor countries” remark.
“I think one thing that people probably don’t think about as much as we do is innovation to serve everyone in the community, not just the high end,” Zuckerberg told Tech Crunch on the sidelines of the annual Facebook Developer Conference (F8) on Tuesday.
When asked about the perception of Facebook being less innovative, Zuckerberg said, “I guess I’m not that worried about that. I mean, I feel like we do different kinds of work in different areas.”
He defended the “misunderstood” strategy as laying groundwork for Facebook’s new Camera Effects Platform for developers which was launched at the conference.
“I mean, I think certainly, no one who looks at the solar-powered planes that we’re building or the satellites that were making, and thinks that that stuff isn’t interesting.”
Facebook recently added Snapchat-style Stories and camera special effects to all four of its core social apps: Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram in a seemingly desperate response to competition by Snap.
Zuckerbeg, 32, said ”we focus on a lot of things like Facebook Lite. It’s up to 200 million people in like a year…I tend to worry more and think more about the substance of what our community actually wants.”
Snapchat has strongly denying allegations by former employee Anthony Pompliano, who alleged in a lawsuit that Snapchat boss Even Spiegel had once shot down his suggestion to pursue growth in certain international markets.
Pompliano had alleged that Spiegel said Snapchat is “only for rich people” and that he didn’t want to “expand into poor countries like India and Spain.” This drew strong reaction in India as many users deleted the app drawing share prices for the company and reducing rating to one-star on app store.
Snapchat had refuted the reported claims and said the company is “grateful” to its Indian users and that “Snapchat is for everyone.”
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