Well, we finally know the secret to Mark Zuckerberg’s success: He wears an identical gray T-shirt every day. “I want to clear my life so I have to make as few decisions as possible beyond serving this community,” Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, said on Thursday.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s explanation of his sartorial preferences, which he compared to the similar simplicity practiced by President Obama and the late Steven P. Jobs of Apple, came in response to a question during a town hall discussion he held with about 200 Facebook users at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
The event, which also featured questions sent to Mr. Zuckerberg via the Facebook social network, was webcast live and was the first in what he said would be a regular series of conversations with Facebook users. (You can watch a recording here.)
For close followers of Facebook news and trivia, there were few surprises.
Mr. Zuckerberg reiterated his determination to add high-quality, free phone calls to the list of services that Facebook provides — a plan that won’t endear him to the cellphone carriers that the company works with around the world. “Free calling is certainly something that we’re focused on,” he said — as is delivering Internet service from satellites and highflying planes.
He defended the company’s decision this year to force its users to install a separate mobile app, called Messenger, if they wanted to keep sending instant messages on the service. “Asking everyone in our community to install another app was a big ask,” he said. “We really believe this is a better experience.”
He addressed a perennial question from users about why the news feed doesn’t show everything posted by the friends and company pages that a person follows. “As time goes on, people are sharing more and more things on Facebook,” he said. “There’s just more competition.”
With an average of 1,500 new items that the service could show when someone logs on, Facebook’s computer algorithms try to predict what people would be most interested in — like the birth of a friend’s child — and show those types of items. Posts by businesses rarely make the cut, forcing many of them to buy ads to promote their messages.
Mr. Zuckerberg also discussed one of Facebook’s big failures last year: the aborted rollout of a new look for the Facebook news feed on desktop computers that featured much bigger photos and images. He said the company had made the changes in response to complaints that the design of the news feed felt outdated. “It was really ugly. People would say, ‘This feels like a website from 1990,’ and that hurt,” he said.
But the new design was crafted by Facebook engineers using 26-inch monitors. They failed to appreciate that most people use much smaller screens, so the new Facebook feed showed them only one or two items a screen. “It gave us a blind spot to the computers that most people are using in the world,” he said. The millions of users in the test group rebelled, using Facebook less, and the company scaled back the changes before rolling them out globally.
Mr. Zuckerberg said the company was working hard to diversify its work force, in particular to bring in more women as programmers. He said it was challenging because too few girls are interested in computer science because they see too few women working in computer science, perpetuating the cycle.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 30, was momentarily at a loss for words when a woman from Provo, Utah, asked him what he thought about the accuracy of “The Social Network,” a 2010 movie about Facebook’s founding that made him into a household name.
“I kind of blocked that one out,” he said. “They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.” But that didn’t prevent him from taking the entire company out to see the film when it came out. And after the fictional scene in which his character drinks apple martinis, he said, a lot of employees started drinking appletinis to poke fun at him.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s advice for the aspiring entrepreneurs in the room: “You need to have grit to see things through.” If the Facebook movie had portrayed the real story of the company’s founding, he said, “it would have been of me sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight.”