Has Facebook’s Ship Sailed?

I’m not suggesting that Facebook is going anywhere, too many users, too stable and all that. But what I do find strange is that despite emerging in one of the biggest tech cycles since well…the last huge tech cycle, Facebook as of yet has not been able  to figure out how to monetize itself effectively.

If this downturn lasts until 2010, like some people are saying, advertising budgets will certainly be slashed, even if popular opinion hold that they will be up or at least flat in 2009. In 2010, Facebook will turn 6, that’s pretty old to still need to figure out how to make money (people are already giving Twitter a ton of crap, and it’s barely a year old. Further, with the money, resources and personnel that Facebook currently has at its disposal, their lack of success is even more troublesome. I remarked to Klear the other day that Facebook is the new Yahoo!,   and while I was joking, I could see it happening, there are many parallels, between the quality of the staff, the amount of resources, the wunderkind Founder-CEO and so forth.

Facebook is certainly trying, and maybe FB Connect is what’s going to do it for them. I don’t know. But if I was a Facebook investor, I’d certainly take pause to ask myself some hard questions.