Mark Zuckerberg has given his young company a sweeping mission. Facebook's raison d'être, says its baby-faced chief executive, is “to give people the power to share, in order to make the world more open and connected”.

If that sounds like a self-conscious echo of the famously expansive mission statement of another young internet company, it is no coincidence. 谷歌 had the effrontery to claim that it would one day “organise the world's information and make it universally accessible”. Mr Zuckerberg seems to suggest he has found a better way of doing it, with people rather than algorithms at the centre.

Until recently, it was easy to dismiss such ambitions as the hubristic musings of a young upstart. After all, Mr Zuckerberg founded the social networking site just five years ago in his Harvard dorm. Until 2006, only high school and college students could join. Facebook, which allows people to keep track of what friends say and do, was not even the largest such network; MySpace boasted more users.