"This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication," Cameron Marlow, the tall 35-year-old leader of the Data Science team, says with a characteristically serious gaze before breaking into a smile at the thought of what he can do with the data.
As executives in every industry try to exploit the opportunities in "big data," the intense interest in Facebook's data technology suggests that its ad business may be just an offshoot of something much more valuable.