Facebook Wants to Be MySpace

Says Zuckerberg:

When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

This represents a substantial departure from Zuckerberg's privacy stance over the past few years. While other companies may be "trapped by the conventions of their legacies," he explains, Facebook tries "to always keep a beginner's mind." Since its inception, Facebook's differentiator has been the ability to construct social networks in which the flow of information is controlled tightly (at least compared to other platforms).

Twitter, reality television, blogs and blog commenting, according to Zuckerberg, suggest that people aren't guarding their privacy as carefully, which would mean that Facebook has an opportunity to anticipate what its 350 million users want. We may not all be over-sharers, but we're certainly willing to give up a little more, the company seems willing to gamble.

This doesn't really strike me as the driver, though. Facebook is hinting that it's hoping to go public this year, which will change a lot for the company. Instead of having a handful of private investors, including Digital Sky Technologies and Microsoft (MSFT) leaning on it about revenues, profits and growth, Facebook has to get ready to contend with equity analysts, institutional investors and the various pundits, watchers and commentators who could send its stock price into a pinball-like craze.

Open profiles make searching and cruising easier, which translates to more pageviews, ad impressions and (of course) revenue -- which Facebook could probably use these days. The company is going to want to put its best foot forward when it decides to make a move into the public space, both in terms of the revenue and earnings its put up and its ability to generate both in larger numbers in the future.

The size of Facebook's user base is well known and often cited as a sign of strength, but that's not the measure Wall Street will use when evaluating the company's prospects as it tries to break into public capital markets. It's all going to come down to the revenue it can bring in the door.