Facebook Founder Flounders on “60 Minutes”

Last night, Facebook’s 23-year-old founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on “60 Minutes,” the most watched TV news magazine the US. The interview didn’t necessarily break any new ground for those of us that cover the company regularly, but it was the first time Zuckerberg appeared in front of tens of millions of viewers to explain what Facebook is, why people use it, and where it’s going.

What happens when old school investigative journalism meets new-fangled social networking? You get gems like Lesley Stahl's interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on last night's "60 Minutes."

For die hard Facebook junkies there's hardly any new information about the site or its founder. However, there are a couple interesting tidbits about Beacon (he still supports it), an IPO (no go in 2008), and how he stacks up against other Valley figures like Larry and Sergey from Google. Be sure to check out the videos...to see the 23 year old wunderkind in all his stiff, robotic glory.

The worst part (about 3 minutes in, on the online video) came when Stahl said Facebook was the new Google. "You seem to be replacing [Google co-founders] Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone's talking about," she said. Zuckerberg didn't say anything. "You're just staring at me," she said, almost immediately. "Is that a question?" he asked her. Then: "We were warned he could be awkward," she said in a voice-over.

Facebook is the new Google, but not in the way Mark Zuckerberg wished. The 23-year-old founder is facing the same press backlash as his predecessors at the search company. His recent 60 Minutes interview ignored several pressing questions, and most of the show's 12-minute segment (available on CBS News Video) simply explained Facebook for old people and rehashed the usual "baby CEO" profile.

Asked about Beacon and as to whether users who signed up to connect with friends now felt that they were “snooped upon” Zuckerberg responded that “Beacon makes Facebook less commercial.” WTF? You can draw your own conclusions on that. He also gave an example of Beacon selling scarfs “proactively,” and said that Beacon was a good thing because Facebook needed to feed it’s 400 employees, after earlier ducking a question about Facebook’s business model (in particular a lack of revenue.)

All in all, there was only piece of information that seemed more qualitatively revealing than anything else uttered during the 10-15 minutes of, much of which was more a historical summary of the company and its chief founder than anything else. (Excusable, considering the non-tech-savvy demographic of the 60 Minutes viewership) The headline quote of the evening: “Highly unlikely to go public in 2008.”