In three years or so when Facebook finally settles on a business model. Assuming, of course, that it’s a viable one. And that it doesn’t send privacy advocates into paroxysms of angry status updates.

In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trotted out the old “growth over profits” cliché as explanation for the company’s long-absent business model. “… what every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I’m pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today. … Growth is primary, revenue is secondary.”

Yeah. Tell that to the stock market …

[Image Credit: The Onion]

Google (GOOG) today unveiled a new tool that promises to measure Internet usage more precisely. Called AdPlanner, it combines search engine and audience measurement data to create a richer, more intelligent picture of Internet usage, one that may prove far more useful to advertisers looking to identify the best places to buy ads that will reach their target audiences. Slap it together with the recently announced Google Trends for Web Sites and what use is there for traditional advertising-research suppliers?

Great news for media buyers and advertisers who’ve long relied on comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen/Netratings and their shallow, inconsistent metrics. Ugly news for comScore and Nielsen/Netratings, which now seem destined to be disintermediated by Google in much the same way the company disintermediated the rest of the online advertising industry. Sadly, they’ve no one to blame for this but themselves. It’s not like they haven’t been hearing complaints about discrepancies in audience measurement for nearly a decade now (some, presumably, from Google itself).

“We in the marketing-media ecosystem have spent too many years trying to clean up the residue of flawed media-research methodologies,” Randall Rothenberg, president & CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau wrote in a scathing letter to comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings back in 2007. “We simply cannot let the Internet, the most accountable medium ever invented, fall into the same bad customs that have hindered older media and angered advertisers for decades–customs such as inadequate samples, accepted out of begrudging convenience; or phantom metrics, like ‘pass-along readers,’ that add shadowy bulk to audiences that cannot be measured directly; or metering technologies and processes that are easy to game.”

Using SelfServe, American Express, for example, might aim ads at users that MySpace has identified as having a pulse and mercilessly beat them into submission with credit card offers. The site has created more than 100 user-interest categories already and hopes to have 300 by the end of the year. “We’re looking at everything people put into their profiles and what their friends are into,” Arnie Gullov-Singh, a Fox Interactive vice president, told the Los Angeles Times.

And so the evolution of behavioral targeting begins. “It changes everything,” said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer at Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit that includes MySpace. “Every form of targeting has been trying to get to what that individual is thinking about, passionate about and interested in. It defines the next generation of targeting.”