**Special Note** For the record this post was in my drafts and I'm using it to test posting with Windows Live Writer.  I don't know why you'd need to know that but I thought I'd tell you anyway.

Jeff Zuckerberg is an interesting character. From his scandalous “under 30 comments” (I was offended and I’m under 30) to the newsfeed controversy he’s managed to rub people the wrong way at an astounding rate (for a nice summary of most of these scandals see here). This is still my favorite Zuckerberg quote…

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."

At the same time, his company has managed to add enough innovation to largely negate much of the negative influence that the various scandals have had.

So I’m interested to see where this whole Beacon mess goes. For those who have been under a rock, Facebook created a new service called Beacon in which each user’s purchases (from other sites) would be published on their newsfeed (Dare Obasanjo has a nice summary post about it). People were automatically opted in to this and there was no global opt out which caused a huge stir.

The issue here is that anyone with even a little experience with people should have seen this coming from a mile away. Had they even polled their own employees I have to believe that a good percentage of them would have balked at the idea of springing this on people without even a warning.

Which brings me to my point which is that I don’t think a 23 year old should be running a company with such a public profile. There are certainly exceptions to that rule (Bill Gates for example) but Mr. Zuckerberg has proven time and again that he isn’t one of those exceptions. If it were me, I’d hunt down a CEO with some experience in dealing with the public and resign myself to the role of Chief Technologist as soon as is humanly possible.