Facebook is the big story of the decade, but I wish publications who do these puff pieces do a better job for covering the company.<p>The quote below is enlightening:<p>"This is a somewhat different Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the web is going, into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan."<p>So, Mark has become better at communicating the vision of where the web is going. And what exactly is this vision? It is that Facebook will grow and expand and with one of the largest audience platforms in the world, any move it makes into adjacent domains (places, deals) will be instantly successful. Talk about self-realizing prophecies and stating the obvious.<p>Next:<p>"In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one’s Facebook friends."<p>If you think this is a strength, it is actually not. On the open web the universe is the set of all indexed pages. On Facebook, this universe depletes to what your connections know/discover and now the pages that have the opengraph data on them. I do think that we are quite safe from a world which is exclusively experienced via Facebook because it can't, as things stand, represent the actual universe of information out there.<p>Facebook is a big and important company, but it is also at the height of a frenzy in a domain that is desperate to realize some of the potential it holds - thus the breathless accounts from media, bloggers and of course, the investors. We keep hearing about 500MM active users, but last I checked, they had about 130MM visits in a day, which is not too far off from what a Youtube gets at 103MM. Some degree of perspective is badly required in analyzing these companies, especially when you have nearly zero public data to rely on.