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Great interview with Mark Zuckerberg over at GigaOM (I like their coverage on events).

Here’s what the interview would have looked like if I was there:

Stacey: Let’s talk about monetization. You said yesterday that you envision the social advertising landscape evolving over the next 10…15…20 years. How will those ads evolve and when will we start seeing aspects of them on Facebook? And where does Beacon, which you said wasn’t an ad effort, fall into this?

Mark: Beacon was a part of the platform. It was part of this while effort to blur the boundaries between what’s inside Facebook and what’s outside Facebook. Beacon was our first cut at a protocol to do that.

When it comes to social ads we really want to line up what people are trying to do on Facebook and the utility it offers with monetization. If you look at what people are trying to do on the site, it’s communicating and connecting with each other and sharing information, so the business model should be around people sharing information and staying connected.

Davide: Fair enough.
Mark: In banner advertising, people who have developed a trust with the audience run a banner ad and the trust bleeds over to the ad so people pay attention to it.

Stacey: (making a skeptical face.)

Davide: (also making a skeptical face.) Mark… Is it ok if I call you Mark? Are you high on something? “people who have developed a trust with the audience”… wtf? So in Facebook’s eyes companies are “people” and the real people like me are just “audience”?

Mark: What? You look like something’s wrong? People go to a content site to see a specific kind of content and will trust those ads relate somehow to it. On Facebook, people aren’t coming to see content from Facebook; they’re coming to see what other people are sharing, so the most natural analog would be having the ads be information shared among the people. Because so much of our society has some commercial component it seems like there will be a way to both share information and line that up with what advertisers want.

Davide: (Ohhh… “it seems” does it?)

Mark: Some amount is happening as advertisers pay to accelerate that distribution of information. The amount they’d be willing to pay is proportional to how much it is accelerated.

Davide: That’s some fucked up shit man!

I’d like to thank Mark and “Me” for making this interview possible.

And off the record…

Davide: What is the Facebook “audience” saying about the constant attempts at lining up “what they are doing on the site” with “what advertisers want”?

Mark: Dude! The interview’s over!

Davide: Oh… sorry! I already know the answer to this one: they just want to be left alone “sharing information and staying connected”. But wait a second… that doesn’t seem like the kind of things “audiences” do.

Stacey: I think you have a point there. Facebook users aren’t a quiet bunch. Comparing them to an “audience” is looking at Facebook as a tool for “advertisers”, not one for people.

Mark: Humm… Good point!