A Man in a Bubble…

See this guy on the left? Does he look happy to you? At a minimum he has that “What the HELL happen….!?” look about him. You know, the youngish exec, rocket star, who finally traipses out of the bubble and gets hand slapped by reality –

“Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview,” said Jason Pontin on Twitter. “Poor girl, flirtatiously awful tho’ she was.”

A quick search for “Zuckerberg” on Twitter search service Tweetscan reveals hundreds of posts written by those who witnessed the disastrous interview.

After some more shouted remarks, Lacy turned the microphones over to the members of the audience, challenging them to come up with better questions. Attendees rushed to the microphones and got right to it, asking Zuckerberg about privacy, data portability and requesting tools to help manage the growing flood of information on their Facebook profiles.

Blogger Robert Scoble offered his observations over Twitter: “The audience is asking Zuckerburg better questions than Lacy did.”

Her attempt at a friendly interview derailed, Lacy retreated to the role of moderator.

At least one heckler thought the backlash was because of Lacy’s gender instead of her questions. MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier, who twittered a few swipes against Lacy during the talk, told Wired.com after the keynote that Lacy’s gender might have been behind the reaction of the geeky masses.

“I think some of the there’s some degree of sexism,” he said. “Because she’s a chick, her ingratiating nature is taken as ass-kissing. If it were some guy at Forbes asking the same questions in the same manner, we just would have thought he was drawing Mark out.”

There were some eye-opening moments during the talk, like when Zuckerberg addressed the issue of Beacon, Facebook’s advertising platform which launched to much controversy when media outlets decried it as an invasion of privacy. “We probably got a little ahead of ourselves,” Zuckerberg admitted. He talked about Yahoo’s bid for Facebook, confirming publicly for the first time the $1 billion offer price. Zuckerberg also touched on Microsoft’s investment in his company and fielded questions about the site’s application platform.

This twist of events happened at the SXSW conference down in Austin. As to sexism, well you know after that first round of Iowa television debates with ‘that woman’ moderator it is conclusive that some women just aren’t good with the hardball. Not saying women can’t learn the hardball trait; just watch Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer at work. They can slice and dice with the best of them. But men learn the road of hard knocks early and learn how to dish it out as a defensive requirement of survival.

To Zuckerberg. Here was a man clearly unprepared. Not that he does not know Facebook. But it is clear that the people under him are shielding him from the realities of the Facebook customer base. That is never good in any company of any size. Some filtering yes, but I think Zuckerberg is getting the fertilizer treatment. [You know it. Company produces a crap product. yada, yada. The memo that hits the CEO’s desk says– “Great fertilizer with improved growth!!”] I bet there will be some process changes at Facebook in the coming weeks on that score.