Long airplane rides are great for catching up on my reading. But instead of putting my nose in the latest John Grisham novel, I opted to flip thru the March 9th issue of Fortune instead which carried the cover story, “How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives.” It wasn’t all that fresh in terms of the content that it reported, but did offer a few interesting insights into what the company says, or more appropriately doesn’t say about its posture toward monetizing its community.

The basic theme that permeated the article is that Facebook knows that it needs to think about how to start throwing off more cash than it burns, but that no one is particularly frenzied about making that happen any time soon. The article suggests that Facebook could fall the way of AOL’s popular IM messaging platform which garnered a huge audience but never figured out a way to monetize it, but in the next paragraph quotes COO Sandberg as saying that the most important thing right now is getting more eyeballs thru its global expansion. And, it makes the point that we have been making for some time now, everyone but Facebook is making money on its platform. Developers build applications that monetize actions off of Facebook, organizations use it to recruit new members, brands build fan pages that drive purchases off of Facebook and as I mentioned in a recent post, individuals are now even using the mini news feed as an ad hoc classified marketplace.

Yet Zuckerberg is said to be soldiering on, his vision of creating the world’s social utility for making and keeping relationships and sharing photos to friends networks. Utility is an interesting choice of word, I think, since as mundane and invisible as utilities of other genres are (think gas, electric, water, telephone, cable), they all charge for access and for the ability to use it to power other things (like stoves, appliances, showers, conversations, television). These familiar utilities are obviously indispensible for our daily lives, and it only takes one power outage to underscore the criticality of them. So, when Zuckerberg uses that term does he in fact mean that the future of Facebook will be to charge us monthly tariffs for access to our networks? Or for the right to take them with us as we travel the web via Facebook Connect? Advertising as a business model has flopped so far, but if Facebook decided to charge each of us $2.00 a year to access our networks, would we put up with advertising as a way to continue to get access for free? Or would we vote with our mouse clicks and move our networks elsewhere where we can hang out with them for free?

As we know all too well, the model of if you build it they will come, created a lot of cool ideas but not a lot of profitable businesses on the web. Facebook has too many smart people at the helm (and as investors) to let that happen. That said, their challenge now is pretty basic … solving the chicken and egg business model problem inherent in all platform businesses. Doing that means really understanding which side is needed the most, and then charging the other side that wants access to them (more) so that pricing models don’t drive away the most valuable side of the platform. At the moment, the side that is needed the most is the friend’s side – the dilemma is that the side that wants access doesn’t want to be bothered. Facebook has options, but mostly a lot of tough choices especially since the world has changed a lot since Zuckerberg had his brainstorm in his Harvard dorm room 5 years ago. In a nod to the decisions that face them, the article reports that Zuckerberg has eschewed the casual Facebook dress code and is wearing a shirt and tie because 2009 is, to use his words, “a serious year.” When he tosses the NorthFace jacket for a suit jacket, we probably all need to really worry.