Bloomberg.com reports that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t too concerned about how people are struggling. He’s just happy he’s on the right end of this economy

Facebook Inc. plans to expand its staff by as much as 50 percent this year as it benefits from a surplus of engineers amid the recession, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said.

“No one else has been hiring,” Zuckerberg, 25, said in an interview. “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

While it’s pretty easy to see the business upside for Facebook since so many talented people are being let go during this excuse for cutting staff recession there is likely to be a better way to say it. Can’t you feel the compassion for the down-trodden? Well, considering the source, forget I even mentioned that.

Zuckerberg’s pitch internally is that the Facebook crowd must keep the lean and mean look in order to keep costs under control and to hit the lofty revenue numbers ($500 million this year) that have been set.

“The thing I want to remind people of is we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” Zuckerberg said in the Aug. 20 interview. “A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you’ve made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage.”

Gotta love the HP feel to his approach. Facebook is certainly one of the ones looking better than most during this current day and age. Keeping everything on the cheap makes for good press for sure. One wonders, though, if there going to be the revenue projected for the company and where will it come from as the advertising strength of social networks is still a largely untested area. As it always is, this will be interesting to follow as everyone feels their way through new models and markets with literally no history to look back to for guidance.

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Based on a post for the General Counsel for Facebook

As I read the post my greatest question was did they actually get 30% of their active users to vote so the following statement in a post from Facebook’s Grand High Poobah, Mark Zuckerberg, would play out

We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard. For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days.

There was a ton of speculation around what that number actually was. Based on Ullyot’s post announcing the results (this seems so silly in light of covering important votes like political elections, doesn’t it?) there are a few questions raised. Ullyot states

The more than 600,000 users who voted constitute a significant number of people, but at the same time that’s a small number compared to our user base of more than 200 million. We made significant efforts to make voting easy and to give everyone the opportunity to vote — including by translating the documents and voting application into several of the most popular languages on the site, showing a message about the vote on users’ home pages, and running advertisements and videos across Facebook promoting the vote.

Ok, 600,000 voters. If this were to be binding then that means there are only 2 million active users. Even if only 50% of the total Facebook user number that is popular to quote now (200 million) are active then 30 million votes would be needed for a binding result. Either way this is some bad math for Facebook.
So what’s the real deal here? Facebook is saying that

the preliminary numbers indicate that approximately 74.4 percent of users who voted chose the proposed documents – the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities – over the existing Terms of Use

74% of 600,000 remember. So unless Facebook fesses up to much lower usage numbers or they choose to ignore the 30% rule this vote is strictly a PR move. They can actually still do whatever they want because their requirement of 30% of the total users being involved in the vote for the results to be binding probably was not met. If it was met then advertisers are going to be very interested in that ‘unspoken result’ that says ‘well, looks like we only have 2 million actual users in the last 30 days’.

Ullyot’s post says further

We’d hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users just like it was a first for Facebook. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we’re going to consider lowering the 30-percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.

Also, in an attempt to look like this vote is ‘rubber stamped’ by the loudest proponents of change the Facebook post gives links to the 4 biggest people involved in the ‘movment’. Looks good unless you actually click on the links and see that they are all dated prior to the results being reported.

So basically this ‘result’ is in question still. Advertisers will be very interested in how many people are actually using Facebook vs. those who just have an account. Also, all of this reaching out to the people stuff could really be just a big PR play with little substance. Or, if there is an actual statement buried somewhere that says this is or is not a binding result, either there are only 2 million active users in the last 30 days of Facebook or people don’t care nearly as much as we think. Either way the folks over at Twitter must be snickering because once again Facebook’s attempts to be transparent leave the waters more muddied than ever.

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