For the first time in a long time I was watching the six o’clock local news and heard about this during what had to be a two minute tech report. They also mentioned the DOJ settlement and e-books, which is something I’ve never seen before on local TV news. Up until recently it’s as if the Internet never existed. But I think that’s changing, and it’s going to move fast now.

But I digress. This post is about Mark Zuckerberg and facebook, which I always find fascinating. This article says he jumped right into the topic of facebook stock during a recent speech.

“The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing,” Zuckerberg said.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with facebook and I’ve been a user since its inception when a writer friend told me about it. This is back when it wasn’t unusual to have a few friends, and you knew them all. I actually feel nostalgic about FB, and I’ve made some very nice friends there…which I’m sure was the original intention of FB. But this comment about FB always makes me wonder WTF people are thinking.

More than half of Facebook’s nearly 1 billion users access the site from mobile devices, but Facebook has struggled to make money from them. Zuckerberg emphasized the untapped potential of the medium.

Not the part about mobile decives. I agree with Zuckerberg that this is the future. I’m talking about the alleged 1 billion users. I hear this all the time and it always amazes me. If most of the users on facebook have at least two accounts, wouldn’t that make it a half a billion users? And if you took it to another level and said that at least a third have multiple accounts for sockpuppets, pen names, infants who can’t even use facebook, and pets (yes, I’ve seen this with pets) how many actual human beings are really using FB? Or is this number based on actual accounts?

In any event, I find this all so fascinating because it’s all based on advertising. And I can tell you for certain that I have never once clicked on an ad in any social media…for anything. I don’t even pay attention to them. I know a local realtor who is paying to advertise on facebook and I just shake my head and wonder even more.

The early results from Facebook’s still-developing products are promising: “Those mobile ads perform better than the regular column ads on desktops,” Zuckerberg said.

I’m sure they do. But if I see an ad on my phone, I’m either going to turn it off or ignore it. And that’s no reflection on FB. I just don’t want to be bothered. I DRV everything now because I pay a huge monthly fee for TV and I don’t want to watch ads…period. When TV was free I didn’t mind ads. Now that I pay, I do mind them. I don’t mind the ads on FB either. But that doesn’t mean I pay attention to them.

I can’t even begin to predict where this will go, or how social media will evolve. It’s either going to move forward as Zuckerberg hopes it will, or it will become what was once a fascinating passing trend in our lives. I also think that as the Internet becomes more regulated the way people use social media is going to change. And this will happen. We’re already seeing signs and anyone investing in social media should be paying serious attention to this.