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News.com's Caroline McCarthy cornered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW and asked him when Facebook would make the kind of philanthropic efforts that Google and Microsoft do. Not yet, Zuck said. ""We're not incredibly profitable, we're not at that stage." For now, he said, people should remember that Facebook itself is a charitable gift to the world.

But I'd like to think that just what the company is trying to do in general, just helping people communicate, is actually making the world better. A lot of people are actually building really interesting applications that are more to the tone of traditional philanthropy, like the Causes application. Just by making this development platform, we're enabling some of those things. The way that we're going about it isn't by donating money directly to charity.

More highlights from McCarthy's interview, below.

  • Leave Lacy alone

  • I thought she asked some interesting questions. We may have not talked about the things that were most relevant to the audience that was here, but I've worked with Sarah on a number of pieces, and I generally think she's really smart and didn't necessarily deserve the reaction that people gave her.

  • The plan to kill spam

  • If (there is) an app where almost every request sent gets accepted, then that app should be able to send way more requests or prompt users to send way more requests. If an app has a lower acceptance rate, we let them publish [fewer] requests.

  • Confirms impending payments system

  • With a lot of applications, like SuperPoke, people are buying sets of icons or signals that they can send to friends — purely a social gesture — but it's real capital being exchanged.

  • Not concerned about economy

  • I don't spend that much time studying the overall economic climate, even though people seem to think that there's this general slowdown going on. It may slow down slightly, or it may not be affected, but in general, our growth is so rapid that I would be pretty surprised if it got affected in a meaningful way.