Facebook apparently had a great second quarter because the stock price jumped about 25% (about $7.00) yesterday. In the second quarter earning conference call two days ago, Mark Zuckerberg listed three main goals for Facebook for the next 5 or 10 years (quotes from transcript of the call that can be downloaded from http://investor.fb.com/eventdetail.cfm?EventID=132054):
“One of the questions I frequently get asked are, what are the big changes we want to make in the world over the next five or 10 years? Now that we’ve connected a billion people, what are the next big ambitions? There are three main goals I’d like us to achieve. Connect everyone, understand the world, and help build the knowledge economy. Connecting everyone is about growing our community to reach the next 5 billion people. …
Understanding the world is about helping people share not just day-to-day updates like text messages and photos but also building up long-term knowledge about the world …
Building the knowledge economy is about helping people create companies and jobs using information. The way I see our advertising product, we aren’t just building a strong monetization engine for our company, we’re creating tools to enable new growth to jobs and businesses through our platform and to support a larger economic shift in the world based on knowledge and information.”