Facebook's financials | Are social networking sites all that they're cracked up to be?

Techcrunch and Allthingsd are reporting that Mark Zuckerberg supposedly talked about Facebook's financials in a all open conference call.

This is coincidental timing since Google just reported that social networking ad inventory isn't monetizing well. I personally haven't clicked on ads in Facebook. Other than the $1 gift things that they offer, I'm not sure anyone actually spends money on the site. People are too busy looking at information about their friends to click on ads!

What astonishes me is the fact that 2008 cash flow will be negative $150 million.  I personally don't think that Facebook is monetizing their users as well as they potentially could. With a cash flow purse like that in 2008 it's pretty rare that they would go public in 2009. Maybe it's not their intent to go public that fast? Having backers such as Microsoft might enable you to get away with this for a while, but I bet investors will start to get antsy.

For a private company, if Mark did talk about these numbers, the question is, what benefit would he and the company get by doing this? Mark is certainly under the microscope and any paper-cut that happens at Facebook turns into a hand gash on the internet.

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