Zuckerberg: 'I am a prophet'

Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that he is a prophet, declaring that he had foreseen that people will soon have no qualms about displaying every minute detail of their private lives on the internet.

Zuckerberg revealed his gift during a staged interview with Michael Arrington at the TechCrunch awards this weekend.

Critics have slated the social networking site for burying privacy controls, highjacking its users' data and allowing advertisers to farm Facebookers to help them flog tat. Oh, and eroding an generations' respect for their own and other people's privacy.

However, this has obscured the true genius of Zuckerberg and his crew. In fact, rather than facilitating the erosion of privacy in the name of commerce, Mark simply looked into the future, and built a company that could take advantage.

The fact is, Zuckerberg said, that people want to share everything, and they want to share it on the internet. That is the "new norm", and he saw it coming.

"People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and more openly and with more people."

"That social norm is something that something that evolved over time and we followed."

Older companies had been hamstrung by "conventions" and their legacy systems, Zuckerberg said. On other hand, he had magically peered into future, from his "dorm room at Harvard", and constructed a company that would be ready to facilitate this brave new open future when it arrived.

"We thought this would be the social norm and we went for that," he declared.

Which presumably means all those run-ins with privacy campaigners, regulators etc., were just bumps on the road, as Mark worked to realise his vision of a world where everyone shares everything. With his clients.

Still, it makes you wonder. If Zuckerberg really has this gift of second sight, wouldn't it have just been easier to place some kind of accumulator bet on the world series? Least that way no-one would have had to see pictures of him lounging around the pool. ®