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Facebook files for IPO, Zuckerberg outlines his vision for 'rewiring' us



Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a news conference at Facebook headquarters on October 6, 2010 in Palo Alto, California.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a news conference at Facebook headquarters on October 6, 2010 in Palo Alto, California.
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Facebook waited until the end of the business day in New York to file its S1 papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission — the prelude to what could be the biggest tech IPO of all time later this year. 

But who cares about the money? For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who's worth about $25 billion, it's all about togetherness. This is from his letter that accompanied the filing (thanks to Nicholas Carlson and Business Insider for the quick breakdown):

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

Let the vast rewiring begin!

It's worth noting at this point that all that sharing — the 800 million unpaid workers and the 100 billion unpaid connections — is where Facebook's extremely high speculative valuation is coming from. So you might want to ask Zuckerberg, at this point, to drop the vision-thing message and perhaps thank his Facebook Nation (Continent? Small Planet?) of worker bees — who will not become millionaires when Facebook does the IPO — for all the free labor. It's about time they got at least a small chance to receive their cut. 

Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.