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. Google 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.