Following yesterday’s news that Mark Zuckerberg had joined Twitter, Mark began following hundreds of followers this afternoon. In just over a day, Mark attracted over 5,000 followers on Twitter, more than have become fans of him on Facebook. So why would Mark suddenly become so active on the site? Eric Eldon speculates that one reason may be that they’ve revisited the negotiating table with Twitter and have successfully agreed upon a rational valuation.

A counter argument to this speculative notion is that Mark is trying out what it’s like to use a completely open communication channel as Facebook will soon become just as open. As Eric Eldon also notes, David Recordon recently suggested that the site will soon be much more open and Mark Zuckerberg decided to confirm that via a public Tweet, “@daveman692 You’re not crazy :)”.
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Over the weekend Consumerist published an article describing Facebook’s updated Terms of Service. Now users are up in arms over the updated terms. The angry users which includes some of Facebook’s biggest evangelists, claim that Facebook is in the wrong after developing a more aggressive terms. A search for “Facebook terms” on Twitter turns up a ton of tweets from angry users. The statement which is causing some controversy is as follows:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Facebook has essentially changed their terms so they now own your content indefinitely. So what does this mean for the average user? Probably very little. Mark Zuckerberg has clarified why they updated the terms on the Facebook Blog:
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We all have skeletons in our closet, but we don’t typically expect those skeletons to emerge and make millions of dollars for other people. It can be a scary situation to face, and if you’ve spent a considerable amount of time building a reputation around a pristine image, then compromising that image isn’t really an option.

That’s part of Valleywag’s conjectured reasoning for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg having finally made some sort of amends with Eduardo Saverin. A fellow classmate at Harverd, Saverin has had an ongoing feud with Zuckerberg, maintaining that he’s a co-founder of Facebook and deserved some recognition. Now that Ben Mezrich, best-selling author of “Bringing Down the House,” is working on a book detailing the ugly side of Facebook’s beginnings, perhaps Zuckerberg is hoping that settling the score with Saverin will minimalize the amount of material he could have otherwise provided for Mezrich’s upcoming book.
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There’s been a lot of buzz today about Mark Zuckerberg’s new “sentiment engine” that Facebook is supposedly working on according to Robert Scoble who was paraphrasing a conversation he had with Mark Zuckerberg while walking the streets of Davos. Working on a sentiment engine sounds like something which is more abstract. This is in contrast to what Tim Kendall said in the podcast I posted this morning, which was that Facebook is working on bringing status update content and the time frames of those updates to the ad platform.
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There’s been a bunch of buzz over the past 24 hours about a statement made by Mark Zuckerberg this week at the Web 2.0 Summit. As Saul Hansell wrote in the New York Times on Thursday, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

If you’ve been at a conference where someone from Facebook was speaking in the past year, then you’ve heard repeatedly about how Facebook is all about sharing. The idea is simple but powerful. Users continue to post more photos, upload more videos, write more status updates, connect with more friends, and ultimately are spending more time sharing their lives online.

While people aren’t living online, Facebook and other social utilities have become an integral part of the digital lifestyle. If Facebook’s success relies on the Zuckerberg law, the company definitely needs to focus on making sure they are the easiest platform for sharing information with all your friends. Fortunately for Facebook, the company is arguably the best way to share information among friends.

As long as Facebook keeps attracting users and remains to have the most accurate representation of the global social graph, they will remain to be the best place for sharing information. If the Zuckerberg law holds true that means Facebook is going to have a lot of information to store over the next few years. Now all the company needs to do is figure out the best ways to monetize that data.

I’m at Web 2.0 Summit, where John Battelle and Mark Zuckerberg will be having a 20- to 25-minute conversation. I’ll be live blogging the conversation so feel free to refresh. They should be taking the stage in the next five minutes, so check back for live updates.

1:48 pm - John Battelle and Mark Zuckerberg should be taking the stage momentarily

John Battelle (JB) asks: How’s the financing going
Mark Zuckerberg (MZ): We had really good terms on the round with Mark Zuckerberg.

JB: Trips to Dubai.
MZ: Oh

JB: Do you need money?
MZ: No.

JB: One of the things you told me related to money is that you are not focused on optimizing for revenue. There have been articles suggesting that you’ll have to focus on it now

MZ: There’s a team at Facebook who worked on building the translations application and now we have more than 20 languages available. We want to make sure people can share and connect with the people around them. In the past I’ve said we aren’t focused on revenue and people have interpreted that as to mean that we aren’t focused on revenue but currently we have two solid revenue streams.

We’re also opening new offices. We have one in France, we’ve opened one in dublin.

JB: How does it breakdown? Brand versus online.

MZ: Both are growing in different ways.

JB: When you did the deal with Microsoft it was a big part of your revenue mix.

MZ: When we did it early on it was a much larger portion of the revenue but that’s no longer the case.

JB: Do you think Steve Ballmer is happy with the price he paid?

MZ: I think it was more about the partnership and lest about the investment. We’ve found that they’ve been a really good partner. They’ve been a very good partner in that we are both trying to “build new things” … not much details there.

JB: But do you think Steve’s happy with the price he paid?

MZ: People really obsess over the price.

JB: It was $15 Billion …

MZ: We felt like we got favorable terms and it made sense for us to do. If we can succeed at making it so that a large portion of people around the world are involved in the development and usage of Facebook then it’s really good. We aren’t focused on justifying a $15 billion valuation.

JB: Can you remind people how many people work at Facebook?

MZ: It’s over 700 right now.

JB: Do you have a hiring freeze?

MZ: No … we’re hiring really great people. We’re really aggressively expanding the sales effort. Take France for example, I was just visiting. 7 percent of their population is on Facebook. When I go back in a year it could be 25 or 30 percent of the population and that’s why we put an office there.

JB: Let’s talk about Connect.

MZ: We just announced that anyone can apply. We’re now working toward the full opened release.

JB: There is a criticism that Facebook is a walled garden and that you don’t want to be part of OpenSocial and a broader, distributed web.

MZ: There’s this very clear transition from closed systems to open systems. Overtime I think it’s worth exploring how the companies can work together. Right now the particpating companies are much smaller than Facebook individually. Mark mentions Facebook potentially becoming the open standard.

The reason that Microsoft became such a big company is because they didn’t attempt to build the entire computer, instead they built an open platform for people to build on. We got through this hurdle of people not wanting to put up their information and the way we got through that was privacy settings.

JB: Mentions the multiple people that have been fired due to Facebook just from today alone.

MZ: Well the privacy settings are there. We’re trying to make more tools for people to share information and now with Facebook Connect they can do that from their own websites. If were not on the edge of that we’re not doing a good job.

JB: When you announced this last year everybody ran into their meeting rooms to ask what are web going to build. A year later, there’s a feeling that the platform hasn’t lived up to its potential. There has been some criticism from people here.

MZ: Earlier this year we changed the way the platform works. What we basically did was we skewed the incentives for developers. The amount of attention that an application gets is directly proportional to the amount that they let share information.

JB: Give us an example of applications that are going well.

MZ: With the election Causes has been doing pretty well. When we changed the platform we knew that applications that just put boxes in peoples’ profiles would be hurt. Anything built around user interfaces can now be built on their own website. It’s inherently making a site social to plug into Facebook Connect. We took a slightly slower ramp up period and we learned from the last time that we’d like to be more careful about it.

JB: How do you and your partners make money with Facebook Connect?

MZ: For the first version there is nothing that is revenue generation. The whole model is ad driven. If people are using their Facebook data around the web there is a direct correlation with how their using the site.

JB: Let’s talk about the online ad piece. Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?

MZ: I think they’re doing really great stuff. Is it a feature? I think they’re a great tool.

JB: Is Twitter a partner for Facebook Connect?

MZ: Yeah.

JB: Is the model an endorsement model or is there another model?

MZ: The brands we are mainly working with now, the ads have been performing fairly well. We have a second iteration of engagement ads. We launched Social Ads last year and we released a new form of engagement ads on the homepage this year. People don’t just want to see news, they want to see what’s going on with their friends. When we see other people and their friends engaging with an ad, it makes it more likely that other people engage with that ad. Mark Zuckerberg is now going over the types of ads that are being run currently.

JB: I want to ask you about something that has come up in the past few days. One of those is that Facebook has been banned in the workplace. There are a lot of things that make FAcebook not useful for inside companies. What do you think of that market?

MZ: Anecdotally we’ve seen a trend in the opposite direction. Financial companies initially blocked them for security purposes, but companies are making it now so people can communicate at work but not directly with their own co-workers. The same type of incentive systems that the site is built off, sharing information and getting feedback, has been working for some companies that use the Facebook platform.

JB: We talked about Connect, exporting a feed, etc. On Google I’d love to check out my Facebook feed so I can make Adsense for Facebook. Is this why you aren’t doing OpenSocial?

MZ: I think people are making this out to be a lot more than it is.

JB: That’s my job, we’re on stage.

MZ: There’s a lot going on between each of these companies and we see a clear trend of people sharing more information online and eventually you can have public streams and things like that. We’ve moved in that direction and on the platform side it’s really early.

Audience Question (US.com Writer): Do you have a plan for retention of members?

MZ: This has always been an interesting stat about Facebook. We always have this pretty amazing stat that 50 percent of users are active every day. What we do is help people share things online. If we continue building things that help people share information with the people they want in the places they want to, we’ll see people continue to share more information online, doubling year after year. I think the best strategy is to contin

Audience Question: We created a huge presence on Facebook with a page around a political issue. It grew to be 140,00 members (Proposition 8). Do you see pages end of life?

MZ: I think people use this successfully. Whether it’s to overthrow regimes or have a policy.

Last week Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by Ryan Carson at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. Check out the video below!