What else does Mark Zuckerberg have in common with Bill Gates?

Like another company founded by someone who would rather play with computers than go to class in Cambridge, Facebook is getting big, fast. It's already huge, in fact. Big companies attract attention. Big companies that engage in questionable practices definitely attract attention, especially when they screw up.

So when Facebook tried to do damage control and spin the outcry over their ill-fated Beacon feature, Boy Wonder Zuckerberg did the obvious thing: he went on 60 minutes and made a complete ass of himself, talking nonsense about how they botched the rollout of Beacon, etc etc. He did this before when they introduced the "news feed" feature, too. 

Now, the New York Times reports that deleting your facebook account doesn't mean your information is deleted. That's right, they keep it. Why? So you can reactivate your account later, of course. 

When Beacon launched, Moveon.org was the group that got them to pull back and fix the privacy problem. Mr. Zuckerberg and friends have had to give in on privacy concerns twice now. That's two strikes. They're lucky that the government hasn't gotten involved, because to date, Facebook has largely ignored it.

Yes, Zuckerberg is making the same mistake Bill Gates did over ten years ago, when he was the hot dropout billionaire whose company was all the rage. He didn't think he needed a Washington strategy. To date, Facebook does not have a single registered lobbyist. Not one person has the job of explaining Facebook and its' privacy practices to people like oh say, Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens and his staff. It took a massive antitrust lawsuit to get Microsoft to wake up and establish a Washington presence. Facebook, and countless Web 2.0 companies are making the same mistake. 

Mr. Zuckerberg, here's my question. Why aren't you hiring?