The site has grown quickly and needs around 50,000 more servers to handle the load. Facebook has over 70 million active users and around 109 million monthly visitors.

According to Business Week, Google and Microsoft need a lot of server space. Google has at least a million servers and adds 500,000 per year. Microsoft is adding 200,000 servers per year.

While Facebook keeps expanding, their revenue is rumored to be at about break even. Last year they were said to bring in $150 million and plan to double that figure this year. They have more than 500 employees.

Here’s a short history of Facebook investments:

• 2004 – $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round.
• 2005 – $12.8 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, $25 million from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.
• 2007 – Microsoft invested $246 million for 1.6% share in Facebook and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million.

Comments

Add to the drama a quote destined for the annals of the Professional Journalism Hall of Fame, if there is such a thing, a message to the crowd from Ms. Lacy:

SXSW Logo
(Photo Credit: South by Southwest)

"seriously screw all you guys."

Life imitating art?

On the bright side, she’s getting plenty of publicity for her book.

Let’s catch you up, in case you missed the all the Twittered fury.

It may have only seemed like a cushy yet high-profile gig with the notoriously tongue-tied youngest self-made billionaire in the world – a title Zuckerberg will likely hold until Miley Cyrus hits 18. Lacy at least appeared to be prepared for the James-Lipton-esque chat.

Minutes before the interview was to begin, she was very clear about what she wouldn’t ask him. Blogging for Silicon Alley Insider, she informed readers there would be no needless rehash of questions about the botched Yahoo deal, his youth, or his general interview awkwardness.

However, according to the crowd, and seemingly to Zuckerberg too, there weren’t all that many questions.

It’s not like she wasn’t warned. Before she went on stage she made a telling observation: "Almost every reporter and blogger I’ve talked to today is hungover and angry. All of them have made me keenly aware that they want some news, and that it’s my job to deliver."

Not one to be pushed around, as her Twittered (okay, Tweeted) sendoff a couple of hours later revealed, Lacy’s apparent defiance of that warning turned the crowd against her. Eventually, she would inform the audience that her job wasn’t easy, and turned over the mic to see if they could do it.

And, well, they did. They asked the questions they wanted her to ask Zuckerberg, and all but threw rotten tomatoes at Lacy.

BusinessWeek understandably neglected to mention that part, but in a world of infinite sources, the entire "train wreck" was widely chronicled.

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman did a pretty decent job of capturing the entire holy sh*t! event:

"As a fellow journalist, this was all deeply uncomfortable. It is sort of anathema to write a story that is critical of another journalist. But there’s no question that from the beginning of the interview, Lacy was injecting herself into the story in a way that was far out of balance with the dynamic that should have been in evidence during a discussion between her and the CEO of one of the most talked-about companies in the world."

Valleywag has a nice clip of Lacy "injecting herself into the story," if you’d like an example. A solid minute goes by without Zuckerberg saying anything, with him just sipping his water and nodding.   

Or you can take Scoble’s word for it, whose thumbs must have been awfully sore from the furious Twitter play-by-play. "I’d estimate 70% to 100% were frustrated, based on my interviews and discussions at other panels," Scoble, um, tweeted.

Despite the hostility, Lacy thinks the interview went rather well, which is interesting considering Lewis Wallace says it descended into chaos. "I feel fine about it as a journalist,"  says Lacy in a video interview afterward, even if  Zuckerberg thought the whole thing was "pretty f**ked up."

She says she is used to it, though. "I get this constantly. I’m still employed. Some people enjoy what I do."

Just not the (hostile) crowd at SXSW, whom Lacy says probably ruined the chances for the conference to score another high-profile guest.

Did we mention she had a book coming out?
 

In the CEO Guide to Technology Business Week advises CEOs to take note of the Live Web.

Describing web services such as MyYahoo, Flickr, Wikipedia, MySpace and others as sites that demand interaction and participation, Many of these applications use content syndication and sharing with RSS feeds.

Business Week suggests that CEOs should be aware of how these applications can be applied, both internally and externally.

Here are some examples:

Ernst and Young are using a blog platform with editable web pages and feeds for collaborative work in teams

Ipsen, the European pharma giant is using blogging software to collect and distribute competitive intellignece

Sun MicroSystems and GM are using external blogs to stay in touch with customers and stakeholders.

The key challenge, says the guide, is for executives to learn about all the new Web 2.0 services.

Here are a few of their tips:

Watch what the kids are doing. Email has been relegated to a distant choice after instant messaging, blogs, feeds and social networking sites.

Read blogs and get a feel for the online conversation

Subscribe to feeds and see how easy it is to organize your news and information

There is no doubt that these new web services are changing how we interact – and it is changing how we do business too.

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Sally is the author of Website Content Strategy blog: Information about the shifts in media consumption and the use of
technology in marketing and PR so business can stay in touch with
their rapidly moving audiences.