TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Mark Zuckerberg thinks the right question to ask about Facebook is what can be built on top of it now that it’s past one billion users:

So for the next five or 10 years the question isn’t going to be, does Facebook get to 2 billion or 3 billion? I mean, that’s obviously one question. But the bigger question is, what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are. I think that’s going to be really transformative. We’ve already seen some of that in games and media, music, TV, video, that type of stuff. But I think there’s about to be a big push in commerce.

That’s absolutely the right question to ask, and I think it—the sheer amount of data we have about almost everyone now and what they’re doing—is going to be transformative for many industries and much of our lives.

I’ve written before that I don’t believe in Facebook’s philosophy, but I think much of this is, nonetheless, inevitable. The question is whether we shape the use of our personal information to be beneficial to us as individuals and as a society, or not.