Zuckerberg wears a tie now and says," 2009 is a serious year"

CEO of Facebook, 24 year old Mark Zuckerberg founded this site about five years ago, originally meant to merely serve as an online platform for cool college kids to check each other out. But recently President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft’s new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. With a 175 million strong army of members, Facebook is growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy.

Facebook is hugely popular because it helps us present different faces to the different people in our lives, with varying degrees of information and privacy (in a digital form).But Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is much more ambitious: to turn Facebook into the planet’s standardized communication (and marketing) platform, as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional – and indispensable.

But the Facebook juggernaut still could very easily go awry: Remember AOL’s Instant Messenger? Teenagers lived on it and companies started using it in lieu of e-mail. But AOL never figured out a way to make money on it. So that should be Zuckerberg’s prime concern – to also figure out a way of making profits from its popularity thru advertisers and marketers. At the same time, users will inevitably become uncomfortable about marketers eavesdropping in and tapping the information constantly from their online behavior, so the challenge is to make the marketing as unobtrusive as possible.

Via: Fortune