I imagine in the early years and as soon as board member's / investor's profit margins started being a topic of discussion it was always known that that model w

I imagine in the early years and as soon as board member's / investor's profit margins started being a topic of discussion it was always known that that model was only the "free trial period" to gain traction, spread awareness, test certain extreme or ambitious features / ideas, and basically do a dry test run of the greater idea: capture as many data points of as many people as possible. I don't think it really would have fit the bill until it was able to capture the internet in the same way that LinkedIn was able to, eventually. But we all know this. Now the early University members of FB are in a position to become paying customers (in a buying of advertising sense) but the real payday was always in the swath of personal information and data that would come along with true saturation of population enrolled into the FB ecosystem. It would've been nice if it could have been made into something more altruistic but it only takes one less-than-intent watching of The Social Network to know that the idea was never altruism. I don't want to go in depth about what I think the masses ignoring what the movie said about Facebook as a whole / the movie's message about Facebook and it's founders considering it was all said in plain dialog as blatantly as possible but that fact surprises me most. That it was stated so plainly and it's taken THIS LONG for the non-tech folks to really start scratching their heads and asking, "Is this is all okay or not?" Capturing the magic is soooo long gone. Now it's about trying to figure out how to keep the devil / criminal activity, not the lightning, in the bottle for as long as possible. Well, from my POV at least.