What’s nice about the Karma app is that users can send gifts almost instantaneously, without having to enter their billing information before doing so. You also don’t need to have the address or contact info of the recipient — they enter that information when they choose to accept a gift.

It also allows users to send a personalized note to people they’re gifting, either by SMS, posted on their Facebook walls, or by email. Those receiving gifts can even choose between options or swap out something they’ve been given if they’re not thrilled with what was initially gifted to them.

One of the more interesting aspects about the Karma mobile experience isn’t just that it makes gifting by phone ultra-easy, but that it helps to highlight the news around friends and family that actually matters. There’s so much noise on Facebook that it’s difficult to tell now when a friend is having a birthday, or if someone got engaged or is having a baby. The Karma app, by contrast, uses semantic analysis to determine events that are worth gifting people for.

Karma was founded by Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, co-founders of Tapjoy, which was acquired by Offerpal Media after reaching more than $100 million in revenue. According to SEC filings, Karma has raised $2.3 million through last November, although Linden disputes that figure, saying the firm has raised more (but less than $5 million in total). Backers include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp.

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Before he passed away, Steve Jobs made his final goal clear: make Apple the backbone of the consumer cloud. First Apple launched cloud features within Mobile.me. Then it updated cloud-enabled versions of iOS. With the OS X Mountain Lion preview last week, we can finally see how Apple plans to change our world again.

Any move by Apple is obviously watched closely by Microsoft. But after digging into Mountain Lion’s features and philosophy, I think Apple’s new operating system poses a threat to another, less obvious, company — the current leader in the consumer cloud, Facebook.

Many companies have learned the hard way not to underestimate Apple. For Microsoft and Facebook, now may be the time to make bold moves to ensure their continued relevance in the consumer cloud.

Facebook and Apple, a rocky road

Ever since the last-minute removal of Facebook from Apple’s Ping launch, Apple and Facebook haven’t been on the best terms. The delayed Facebook iPad app, rumors of a Facebook phone and the inclusion of Twitter integration in iOS 5 all add to this division.

With the launch of the developer preview of Mountain Lion, Facebook is notably absent once again. If you believe, as I do, that integrations within operating systems will be critically important for social services going forward, this development is more than a slight – it’s a potential catastrophe for Facebook.

The good news for Facebook is that it already has a friend in the OS game (a friend with $240 million in goodwill) — one it may want to get even closer to.

A friend in Redmond

Rapid consumer adoption of iOS and OS X in any form clearly threatens Microsoft. But OS X Mountain Lion’s social cloud features, including messaging and photo storage, create an entirely new set of competitors beyond operating systems.

Apple has chosen a few strategic partners in Flickr, Vimeo and Twitter, but this isn’t necessarily great news for those companies. Remember, Apple has no qualms about mimicking successful apps from their app store (just ask Instapaper).

The only companies that are worse off are those not involved from the start.

Suddenly, Facebook and Microsoft find themselves on the same side of the table. If I were at either company, I’d be considering huge moves — all the way up to an acquisition or merger.

I realize how crazy this might sound at Facebook, so here is a bit of perspective: The most valuable company in the U.S. has just declared war on you. They want your users’ photos on their system. They want your users’ eyes and attention in their ecosystem and not focused on your site.

Oh, and they have $100 billion in cash, the largest mobile operating system and the fastest growth in personal computer share.

The Mountain Lion roars

The list of Mountain Lion’s features shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. But in its totality, it offers fascinating insight into Apple’s view of the future, one where all content, connections and experiences aren’t tethered to websites, but to the cloud – the cloud as defined by OS X.

The move is such a game changer, it’s easy to miss by looking at features alone. In my estimation, it’s even larger than Om said last week, when he discussed the move to cloud-based operating systems:

“It doesn’t matter whether we use Windows, Mac, Linux, Android or iOS: we can do all the things we like to do as long as the Internet is there.”

Yes, Apple’s upcoming OS gives us a window to the Internet and other services using the cloud, but now our Apple devices will automatically know who we are, who our friends are, the content we care about and all the apps we use. With your reminders, contacts and photos automatically synced between each of your devices, you’ll never feel the Internet.

And you won’t miss it.

In other words, many of the reasons we love Facebook will be baked into all of our online devices, but that content won’t be controlled by Facebook. It will be controlled by Apple.

Of course the Internet will still play a role, but it will take a backseat to features and connections built into the cloud-based OS X Mountain Lion.

Only from Apple

Apple is the only company that can do this alone right now. To create a cloud OS that’s relevant, you need to hit a few critical tipping points:

• Hundreds of millions of active users at several access points (desktop and mobile)
• Billions of pieces of personal information and content generated on your system
• Control over your ecosystem to mandate these changes and force people to get on board en masse

Microsoft barely has a mobile installation base and barely any network, but it does have access to hundreds of millions of desktops.

Facebook may have nearly a billion users, but it is just a website/application at the mercy of the operating system.

But, together, the two form one of the only plausible challenges to Apple’s next move.

If I was at Microsoft, here’s what I’d be looking at:

• OS-level social collaborations: Office in the cloud has been in the works for years. But without a reliable network to tap into, it has failed to gain critical mass. Facebook’s 800 million members (with 100-plus connections each) could definitely help.
• Identity: Facebook probably has the most reliable database of personal information outside of the government. Imagine buying a Windows 9 computer or phone, logging in with your Facebook ID and finding all your content, connections and games installed automatically.
• Social data into Bing: Wholesale collaboration between Bing and Facebook could finally create a legitimate challenge to Google’s search dominance (at a time when Google is showing its first signs of weakness).
• Hooks into the Web: Microsoft was notoriously late to the Web and even later to the social Web. Short of an acquisition or merger, it seems impossible for a Microsoft branded “like” button to make any meaningful headway. This  kind of social curation is imperative to Bing’s success.
• Personal cloud data: As we document more of our lives on our mobile phones, Microsoft’s lack of a meaningful mobile presence puts it at a huge disadvantage. The company will have an increasingly difficult time acquiring users’ photos without a major player in cloud photo storage, such as Facebook.

What Facebook gets:

• Real stickiness: Make no mistake about it, the world is gunning for Facebook. From Pinterest to Tumblr to RunKeepeer, social threats to Facebook’s dominance emerge daily. OS-level integration would create a significant barrier for competitors, or at least require them to play on Facebook’s terms in the Windows sandbox.
• Top-level integration: By seamlessly integrating messaging across handsets, desktops and tablets, iMessage is a great example of an OS-level integration that threatens Facebook. Yes, Facebook messaging works across all of those devices now, but it’s at a disadvantage to native apps.
• Cash: Microsoft has nearly half of Facebook’s IPO value on hand in cash (or equivalents). If Facebook is going to take on Apple or Google (or both), Microsoft’s substantial financial assets could definitely come in handy.

Bonus: The FB Phone 2, powered by Windows Phone

Facebook strategically understands the need for its own handset, but building off of the Android platform is less than ideal, for several reasons. Microsoft has a great mobile OS and quality hardware partners, but it lacks the differentiation needed to make a dent in the market. A Facebook-branded, Microsoft-subsidized and -engineered phone could be the only legitimate competitor to iOS and Android.

Throw in Facebook’s friendship with Zynga, and the partnership could lure talented developers away from their focus on Apple apps.

Time to act

OS X Mountain Lion is a different kind of operating system, and as such threatens different types of companies than operating systems ever have before.

For Microsoft and Facebook, now may be the time to bring their social and OS expertise and users together — before it’s too late.

Edward Aten is the founder of Swift.fm, a social music distribution service. Follow him on Twitter@edwardaten. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of any Company with which he is or has been affiliated.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ingridtaylar.

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As the owner of a social creative agency, and as a rapacious buyer of Facebook ads for clients and for marketing my own company, I live for this kind of news. In an age of over-sharing, these documents landed in my inbox with a splash. I am sharing them in the format I received them. I hope you find them useful.

Full Facebook premium ads overview:

Full Facebook premium ads guide:

Peter Corbett (@corbett3000) is CEO at the creative social agency iStrategyLabs.

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Even as some news outlets like Associated Press hire social-media editors to try and figure out how to make use of tools like Twitter for journalistic purposes, others seem to be intent on locking these tools down and removing as much of the social aspects from them as possible. According to a report in The Guardian, broadcaster Sky News has come out with a new policy that bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, prevents them from breaking news through the service — and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky News account. As with so many other similar social-media policies, this completely misses the point of what makes Twitter so powerful.

Although it doesn’t link to an actual document, the Guardian story quotes from the Sky News guidelines, which tell reporters not to tweet about stories if they are not “a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work,” and says that anything approaching breaking news must be sent to a Sky editor first before being posted. The policy says that retweeting other Sky journalists is fine — provided they are posting updates about a story to which they have been assigned — but it says Sky staff are forbidden from retweeting anything that hasn’t been posted by a Sky News account:

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.

Twitter is the newswire now, for better or worse

This is even more draconian than the most recent example of a news outlet trying to lock down Twitter use — namely, the Associated Press newswire, which came out with standards for retweeting that not only mis-stated how the process works on Twitter, but also forbade journalists working for the newswire from retweeting anything without adding a comment to make it clear that they were not agreeing with the person being retweeted. The AP rules also strictly forbid breaking news on Twitter, which ignores the fact (as I pointed out at the time) that for many people the real-time information network has become the newswire.

Since then, AP has hired Eric Carvin to be the service’s social-media editor (Carvin is the brother of National Public Radio’s Twitter phenom Andy Carvin, who turned his Twitter account into a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions). At a recent social-media event in New York, Eric told me that he was trying hard to convince the wire service that the benefits of social tools like Twitter outweigh the disadvantages. But as with so many traditional media outlets, both AP and Sky chose to focus their policies on what their staff shouldn’t do, instead of concentrating on what they should do.

As we’ve pointed out before, these kinds of rules seem to be aimed at trying to remove the human being from the process, something that may work in traditional forms of media, but fails miserably when using social tools like Twitter. The whole point of using them is to be social, and that means expressing human emotions and possibly even opinions in some cases. The best social-media policies — like the exceptionally minimalist version that Media News CEO John Paton came up with — simply ask reporters and editors to be themselves, but to think about what they post before doing so, and to use common sense and “don’t be stupid.”

Why remove the social from social media?

Sky News says in the email it sent to employees that the guidelines were necessary to ensure that “there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information.” And obviously, a news service doesn’t want dozens of reporters tweeting rumors and innuendo about major breaking stories, or tipping competitors off to a scoop. But banning staff from retweeting anyone outside the Sky News operation makes no sense whatsoever, as Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics notes — Sky reporters should be seen as the key sources for information, regardless of where it comes from.

During the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter was the first to broach the rumor — on Twitter — that the terrorist leader had been killed, when he retweeted a post from the former chief of staff for Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld. Some wondered whether Stelter would get in trouble from the Times for retweeting something that hadn’t been confirmed, and for posting it before his own newspaper. But as far as I know, there were no repercussions — and Stelter’s tweet in turn was retweeted thousands of times, and likely broke the news to many.

That’s what Twitter can accomplish if you use it properly, instead of seeing nothing but threats and potential negative repercussions. Like other media outlets that have tried the same approach, Sky News risks removing all the benefits of a powerful media tool by treating its staff as though they were disobedient children. Elana Zak of 10,000 Words has a Storify roundup of some other responses to the Sky News policy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users and Rosaura Ochoa

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It looks like Facebook wants to address the big weaknesses in its mobile business model before it has to deal with nagging questions from its investors. According to FT, Facebook is set to include sponsored posts in the news feeds of its phone and tablet apps as well as it mobile Website. It’s planning a launch in March ahead of its $5 billion IPO.

The news should come as little surprise considering Facebook stated in its Securities and Exchange Commission S-1 filing that it was weighing inserting sponsored ads into its mobile news feeds, rather than clutter up the limited real estate of a mobile device with display advertising. As I wrote shortly after the filing last week, the S-1 exposed a gaping hole in Facebook’s advertising-driven business model as its customers increasingly shift their usage from the social network’s desktop Website to their mobile phones.

What’s more, Facebook’s mobile problem would accelerate if it failed to monetize that traffic before expanding its scope globally. As it gains traction in developing markets, many consumers don’t have PCs and will view Facebook solely as a mobile-only platform, meaning they would never see an ad if Facebook continues with its current model. In short, Facebook’s biggest future growth depends on a platform it hasn’t made a dime from.

Such a revelation must be chilling to potential investors, which explains why Facebook may be ramping up its mobile advertising strategy quickly. According to FT, Facebook will use the “featured story” format – where sponsors pay to highlight positive posts or endorsements — it launched through the main site in December. Though different from advertising, the sponsored stories keep members within the Facebook app itself, rather than direct them off-site to an advertiser’s Web page. Mobile display ads can be tricky because they create any number of rendering problems among the myriad of different phone browsers on the market and could drive up consumers’ data plan fees – neither are good bases for a marketing relationship.

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An image from the SodaHead poll results (click to enlarge)

Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the new Timeline design. But according to a new poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look.

Seventy percent of respondents to a poll of 1,900 people held by online opinion site SodaHead.com said they did not like the Timeline design and that Facebook should get rid of it. Just 20 percent of respondents liked Timeline, and 10 percent said they did not have Facebook profiles.

And it turns out that the older people are, the less they like the new design: Only 10 percent of people over 65 liked Timeline, compared with 34 percent of people age 18 to 24.

That won’t come as a big surprise to the folks at Facebook, since it lines up with the research the company itself did before Timeline was announced this past fall. At a press Q&A during the f8 conference, in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that older users tended to respond more negatively to Timeline than younger ones. But, he said, that would not stop Facebook from making big changes: “The world is moving quickly, and we want to be innovative and try new things,” he said at the time.

Either way, it seems that Timeline is here to stay. With the Open Graph API, scores of third-party developers have invested significant time and money into building apps that work within the Timeline interface. So now it is not only Facebook that is tied to the new look but also an entire ecosystem of other companies. Besides, this is certainly not the first time Facebook users have reacted negatively to a change in the site’s look, and it seems that by now the people who run the social networking company have learned to ride out the initial jeers.

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In its IPO filing Facebook mentions the word “mobile” 123 times, which, given the term’s buzz-worthy status, is hardly surprising. But in most cases Facebook doesn’t use the word “mobile” in positive ways. In fact, it identifies the proliferation of traffic to its mobile app and website as the biggest risks that its advertising-driven business model faces. The S-1 filing is one big official warning to potential investors: Facebook’s future growth is being driven by user behavior that it has so far failed to monetize.

Of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users (MAUs), 425 million accessed Facebook in December alone through a smartphone or feature phone app or through its mobile-optimized website. In 2011, 85 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenues came from advertising, but none of it came from its mobile platforms, over which it doesn’t serve up display ads. Despite that huge gap, Facebook is doing nothing to discourage the shift in use to handsets and tablets:

We anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile users will continue to exceed the growth rate of our overall MAUs for the foreseeable future, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook. Although the substantial majority of our mobile users also access and engage with Facebook on personal computers where we display advertising, our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices. We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. Accordingly, if users continue to increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.

As the S-1 points out, most Facebook members use mobile to supplement their PC activity, not replace it, so the company does ultimately put its ads in front of their eyes. But that won’t always be the case. As my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out on Wednesday, Facebook and its ambitious CEO Mark Zuckerberg want to rewire the structure of society, making its social network a common medium for meaningful connections among all the world’s peoples and institutions. It is a grand vision, but it also depends on establishing connections to billions of devices that aren’t PCs.

One telling figure in the filing is Facebook’s estimates of its penetration in India, which it pegs at between 20 and 30 percent. India is the world’s second-largest market, but very few of its 1 billion-plus people have a PC or the means to access one. There are 700 to 800 million potential Indian customers for Facebook, and for most of them the social network will be a mobile-only platform.

In the developed world, PC penetration is much higher, but younger generations are increasingly relying on their handsets as their primary means to access the Internet. PC sales are falling off as well, replaced by tablets — another platform Facebook doesn’t utilize for display ads.

A problem with an easy solution

Facebook’s problem has an easy fix: It can simply start putting ads in its mobile apps and website. According to inneractive, the mobile advertising market is booming with ad spending, up 464 percent since February of last year and with a huge 983 percent boost in North American ad spend alone. Berg Insight predicts that mobile will account for 15 percent of all global online ad sales by 2016, making it a $22.5 billion market. Facebook itself in its S-1 estimates that the global mobile ad market in 2010 was $1.5 billion, a market it easily could have tapped into.

My guess is that Facebook just doesn’t want to put apps into its mobile products — at least not yet. There is limited real estate on a handset screen, and Facebook probably doesn’t want to clutter up its slick interfaces with display ads, especially while it is still formulating its mobile strategy. The company is also trying to develop more-innocuous ways of advertising on the small screen. In its S-1 it mentions the possibility of inserting “sponsored stories” in its members’ news feeds.

Though it didn’t mention it in its filing, Facebook may also be investigating nonadvertising means of monetizing mobile traffic. While the social network has free rein in the PC browser, its actions in mobile are limited by the capabilities of the devices its mobile apps reside on, as well as the whims of the vendors who make those devices and the carriers who sell them. Though no operator or OS maker would be insane enough to block the world’s most popular social network, that codependence may require Facebook to partner more closely with key players in the wireless industry, and that, in turn, could lead to revenue opportunities.

France Telecom’s Orange is already working closely with Facebook to sell phones optimized for its social networking features in many of its developed and developing markets. In some countries, Orange is selling plans that include unlimited Facebook access while metering all other data use. The carrier and Facebook haven’t revealed any financial details of the deal, but I would not be surprised if some of those revenues were making their way back to Menlo Park.

Either way, Facebook’s filing makes it clear that it has to do something to monetize its mobile traffic soon. The company will soon be public, and while it will likely be controlled by Zuckerberg and those loyal to him, investors will question why Facebook is devoting so much effort and so many resources to building a mobile business it makes absolutely no money from.

Image courtesy of Flickr user lrargerich

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Facebook is selling investors on the dream that the company is just getting started — not only with selling ad space on its current product, but in creating nearly an entirely new Internet, one where Facebook doesn’t simply create connections between sites and people but creates many different social products too.

This ambitious goal creates an interesting dichotomy. Although every hot startup wants to be the next Facebook, Facebook needs to be every hot startup as well. To execute its vision of total web dominance, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush.

Back in the Day

For the first five years or so, Facebook helped users do three simple things: share photographs, status updates and links with friends. But somewhere along the line Facebook recognized two important facts:

1. If it was going to be worth tens of billions of dollars, it needed to attract hundreds of millions of eyes to the site every day. To do this, it needed to be a portal for every type of content, or better yet, the shell for all consumption of that content. In other words, they needed to become the entire Web.

2. New companies, like Twitter and Instagram, were creating compelling social products that not only challenged Facebook’s dominance but threatened to steal users’ time away from Facebook.

If Facebook was going to be more than a destination for sharing updates with friends and family, it had to move fast. And it did.

Unparalleled Ambition

It’s hard not to respect Facebook for its relentless innovation and lightening fast product updates, as well as its fearlessness in pushing the limits of privacy, user experience  and integration with the web as a whole to achieve its vision.

However, if you look at Facebook’s list of 22 (and growing) products– not to mention the thousands of third-party apps — you begin to wonder if Facebook is overreaching and confusing its members.

Over the last couple of years, consumers have been trending towards products with the opposite approach. Simple, stark, and direct sites and apps that do one thing very, very well. We open Instagram because we want to do one easy thing — share a great picture or see our friends pictures. It’s fun. It’s lightweight. It scratches an itch.

What itch is Facebook scratching? Most people I know can’t clearly articulate why they use Facebook. Now that we’ve reassembled our high school physics class, shared every song we listen to, and uploaded every cat video out there, our feeds (we now have two feeds!) have become cluttered news tickers without any focus or context.

Facebook’s expansions of services and connections don’t come with a backup plan. After Facebook realized that we don’t want to connect with close friends and casual acquaintances in the same way, what did the site do? They added yet another new feature so that we could segment the giant list of friends that they pushed us to assemble in the first place. Meanwhile, the easier option is to just declare Facebook bankruptcy and start over on another social network like Path.

That’s the real irony of Facebook’s recent moves. By copying the startups that threaten them, Facebook actually muddles members’ experience so much that it enhances the need for its competitors.

Here’s an incomplete list of companies Facebook is actively competing with:

• Flickr/Picasa/Instagram (pictures)
• YouTube/Vimeo (video)
• Beluga/GroupMe (group messenger apps)
• Foursquare (location sharing)
• Twitter (activity feed)
• Turntable.fm (shared listening)
• vBulletin (groups)
• News.me/Flipboard (frictionless social news/reading)
• Tumblr/Pinterest/etc (share other people’s pictures)
• AIM/GChat (chat)
• Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail (Facebook Messenger)
• About.me/Flavors.me (Timeline)
• Google+, Path (create rings of friends/acquaintances)
• Plancast (events)
• Craigslist (classified listings)

Many of the hottest startups have easy to use, beautiful and elegant sites built around small but significant problems. Several, including Foursquare, Tumblr, Living Social and Groupon, have had astounding results even in the face of Facebook’s attempts to move into their spaces.

Does Facebook really believe it can implement every solution better than its competitors? Does it think its social graph is so much of an advantage that it can sustain a confused and complicated product?

A lot of VCs ask startups what they’ll do when Facebook copies their features. But come IPO time, maybe Facebook’s shareholders should start asking what happens when Facebook tries to do too much.

Edward Aten is the founder of Swift.fm, a social distribution service for musicians. He’s an active startup advisor, blogger and marathoner in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @edwardaten. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of any Company with which he is or has been affiliated.

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There is a lot to take in when it comes to the much-anticipated Facebook IPO filing: the company’s massive user base of 845 million (more than half of whom log on at least once a day), the $1 billion in net income it made last year, the almost $4 billion in revenue and so on. And it is pretty obvious that co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to extend his social network beyond that, to reach as many human beings on the planet as possible. But in the letter to shareholders that is included in the filing, Zuckerberg makes it clear that his vision goes beyond even that: He wants to fundamentally rewire the way the world works, from interpersonal interactions to commerce to even government.

In the note, which founders and CEOs typically include in their securities filings as a way of introducing themselves and their vision to investors (Google introduced the phrase it is probably best known for, “Don’t be evil”), Zuckerberg says he believes the social connections Facebook allows users to create are more than just a way for friends to stay in touch. He says they can help to change the world:

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

Think about that for a moment. It is fairly common for mission statements in IPO filings to be grandiose, but even so, Zuckerberg’s vision is fairly massive: He is saying he believes social connections will rewire the entire structure of society, that it will become more like a network graph, with multiple connections among points, instead of a top-down hierarchy. He says that a more open and connected world will “help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services,” because as people share their opinions, it makes it easier to “improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”

A more networked world — and one company at the center

Not only that, but Zuckerberg says social tools — experienced through Facebook, obviously — can “bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government” that could help empower people and make officials more accountable:

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

This view of a networked world isn’t something the Facebook CEO came up with all by himself. Academics and social theorists such as Yochai Benkler — the author of the book The Wealth of Networks — and others have been discussing the impact of network theory for some time and the value of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” among individuals (as opposed to the strong ties of religion, culture, etc.). And we have already seen how powerful Facebook connections can be during events like the Arab Spring in Egypt.

But Zuckerberg isn’t just another social-networking theorist. He is the CEO of a company that touches close to a billion people in one way or another, with a market value in the $100 billion range. And he doesn’t just want to enable these changes in society; on a fairly fundamental level, he wants to control them. Whether (and for how long) Facebook can manage to walk the line between enabling and controlling social change remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel, NBC

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A graphic included in Facebook's S-1 (click to enlarge)

The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $5 billion.

The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol “FB.” According to the filing, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead bookrunners on the IPO; Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s Capital, and Allen & Company are also listed as underwriters.

Here are some of the key numbers revealed in the filing:

• Facebook made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, an 88 percent boost in year-over-year revenue compared to 2010, when the company made $1.97 billion in revenue.

• The company has been solidly profitable for at least three years — its net income for 2011 was a very cool $1 billion.

• Facebook has been saving up a nice bit of the cash it’s made: The company had $3.9 billion in cash and equivalents on its books as of the end of the 2011 calendar year.

• Facebook now has 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users.

• Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary was $500,000 in 2011; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s was $300,000.

• Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s total revenues in 2011.

According to a letter written by Zuckerberg included in the S-1 filing, the money Facebook gets from an IPO will help it take advantage of the gold rush around increased worldwide connectivity to the Internet and the mobile devices boom.  The letter reads in part:

“Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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