Marc Zuckerberg’s Microsoft dance

Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg has stressed his desire to keep the company an independent operation.

“You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term,” Zuckerberg told Reuters while in Japan to launch a Japanese language version of Facebook.

Well, he’s right in one sense. You might recall his famous US$1B Yahoo! snub that made the cover of Fast Company.

But really, what else was he going to say? Microsoft is already an investor in the business and he doesn’t want to upset the facebook community (again) by appearing to blatantly chasing the dollar.

I got thinking about this because of a conversation I had with Jason Calacanis this week. He was in Sydney to attend and speak at CeBIT, and I recorded a video interview with him for misaustralia.com (stay tuned for that).

And we got talking about social media business models, as you do with someone like Jason. His point was that the only real way to make big money from social networking is to sell it to a bigger internet player. There’s little money to be made from the ads wrapped around social media – which is what free email services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail are. You need to take them and dump them into a larger bucket where you can charge for different, higher value services, Jason said.

I don’t completely agree with his assessment because Yahoo! Mail is one of the biggest traffic generators among Yahoo!’s web properties. There has to be a very nice income stream from associated traffic on that site alone.

But yet there is clearly merit in the sell-out idea from Mr Zuckerberg’s selfish perspective. And Jason would know, he made about US$25million from selling Weblogs, Inc. to AOL.