The Guardian reports: When Zuckerberg addresses the F8 audience [at Facebook’s annual developer conference] it is with the composure and conviction of a president addressing his citizens. “We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it,” he says as he hammers home his “mission” to connect the world.

He warns of “people and nations turning inwards – against this idea of a connected world and community”, a position that fits both with his ideology and that of Facebook. This is not a speech about technical tweaks, but a state of the union address.

“It takes courage to choose hope over fear,” he adds. Behind the rhetoric and the casual clothes, the message is clear: Facebook is one of the big boys now, taking on huge global challenges and planning for prosperity.

The scale of Facebook’s audience is unprecedented. More than 1.6 billion people use Facebook at least once a month, or half of all internet users. That’s before you count users on other Facebook-owned sites including WhatsApp, which has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and photo-sharing site Instagram, which has 400 million.

Facebook has also introduced its free basics service to 37 countries, offering a free but limited package of apps to mobile phone users, but which some critics say allows Facebook to tightly control the online experience of potentially the next billion people to come online.

“You hear all the platitudes about Facebook connecting the planet, but to say they are doing it for benevolent reasons is absolute nonsense. It’s about connecting commerce, not people,” says venture capitalist and former journalist Om Malik, who reminds us of the hidden agenda of social networking firms: if you’re not paying, you’re the product. [Continue reading…]