What Is Facebook's Business?

Facebook makes money by placing ads next to your status updates and photos. How hard could their business be?

As its S-1 filing reflects, that answer is more challenging than you think. Facebook is going to have to balance a number of competing interests. It's going to have to figure out how to get people to share more of their lives on the social network, while figuring out how to display only the most interesting stuff to each individual person, and simultaneously developing ever more innovative ad products that Facebookers deem useful and relevant rather than intrusive. It's not a simple proposition. Which is partly why, as the S-1 reports, that the company has tacked up signs on the walls of its new Menlo Park campus that say "this journey is 1% finished."