Zuckerberg is simply trying to explain to investors why idealism is important. But he ends up taking the patronizing tone of a brilliant geek telling his date he usually doesn't date girls who don't like computers, so he's going to explain -- in language a fourth-grader could understand -- why they're so important.
"We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other," Zuckerberg wrote. But anyone who has spent time on the site knows that, while Facebook is very good at improving the quantity of friend connections, this comes at the cost of the quality of the interactions. Updates, chats and photos on Facebook are at best placeholders for the meaningful interactions that happen away from the site.
He continues: "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services." This also seems disingenuous considering that Facebook's biggest triumph is to help advertisers by mining user data to target ads and to train them to treat corporate brands like friends. Zuckerberg's letter mentions the word "people" 41 times in 83 sentences. "Business" is mentioned seven times. Advertising, the real mission that the site is structured around, only once.
The ideals Zuckerberg so nobly expounds as Facebook's mission -- an open world, accountable governments, connecting people, the Hacker Way -- belong not just to Facebook, but to the web itself. They have been a part of the Internet from its earliest days. It's nice that Facebook embraces them too, but take out these generic ideals and you are left with a company that is devilishly good at making money from online ads.
So while Zuckerberg's founder's letter may be better written than those of Page, Brin and Mason, it's also the most hollow of meaning. Like Google and Groupon, Facebook started with an idealism that, confronted with the realities of financial markets, collapses in time. The only difference is, with Facebook, this capitulation happened long before it went public.
