by Patrick Appel
Felix Salmon thinks going public has made Zuckerberg a less effective CEO. Frum connects Facebook's recent stock slump to the company's disrespect of user privacy:
[T]rust is an asset that every company should value — especially one that earns money by counting its own clicks. Today, as a question is raised about Facebook's advertising numbers, many of us think: "Gee, whom should I believe? This advertiser I'd never previously heard of? Or Facebook, a company that so often acts in ways that I personally find unethical?"
Facebook is infinitely more important culturally than it is economically. The company may deserve to be worth hundreds of billions, but, in the digital age, there is an increasing disconnect between a website's social and economic clout. The incredible story in the video above, about a man who lost his memory using the "people you may know" function on Facebook to reclaim it, is an extreme example of Facebook's power. But reclaimed memories don't show up on a balance sheet.
