Recently Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook appeared in an interview on 60 Minutes the purpose of which seemed fairly unclear to me. The Interview did not seem to reveal very much however he did cover an IPO (or lack there of) and was very cagey about the recent Beacon fiasco. I would have liked the interviewer to pin Mark down on the issue of its Advertising strategy and its phantom-like revenue model. The Issue to me is simply this: Facebook claims to be working on a revolutionary new highly targeted advertising model however at present – when I log into Facebook I am greeted by set of ads that look similar to the below:

Correct. Every single page I visit when logged in is flanked by a Norwegian advertisement. My profile is not setup to mention Norway and I have 1 friend (About 0.25% of my total friend connections) who is in the Norway network so why, why, why are Facebook serving me adverts in Norwegian?

For a company who hope to paint themselves as one which will overtake Google as the online advertising specialists this is a serious problem? There has been a lot of hype surrounding Facebook recently and talk of it challenging Google, luring its much sought after employees away however to me this seems absurd.

Everything that Facebook does at the moment seems to smack of immaturity, possibly this is the result of Mark Z’s lack of real experience in Business. Many large internet companies today did indeed start off with a CEO who had no real business experience however that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone can do it. Google employees seen leaving for Facebook will only be transferring for one reason: money. With Facebook’s recent valuation stock options can be seen to be as lucrative as the original Google options. Employees leaving to Facebook are not joining it because it is seen as the next bastion of the world’s academics (as Google is) but because they are on a gold rush.

Bottom line: Facebook is not in control of its own ascent, they are clinging on whilst the environment pushes them. Unless they begin to mature as a company they could spiral out of control and I would not want to speculate on what a desperate company might do with all our information if it came to hard decisions.