Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg defended changes to the service that have provoked privacy concerns, but admitted the site doesn't always "get it right".
Facebook last week unveiled a set of features to give its nearly half-billion users better control over what data they share with the public.
But Zuckerberg said pushing the boundaries on other aspects of Facebook, such as a new "instant personalisation" feature that automatically shares users' personal data with websites like Pandora and Yelp, was part of what made Facebook such an innovative company.
"Certainly on a day-to-day basis if we didn't disrupt things that would be the easiest way to proceed," Zuckerberg told the All Things Digital conference.
"But we don't believe that if we did that we'd be doing the best thing for us long-term or for the industry," he continued.
Facebook will continue to make what it believes are the right changes, even if some of them are controversial, he said.
"I don't know if we always get it right," Zuckerberg said about some of the service's controversial new features. "But my prediction will be that a few years from now, we'll look back and wonder why there was ever this time when all these websites and applications ... weren't personalised in some way."
No IPO or webmail
Zuckerberg was asked if he expected to remain chief executive if the company went public. Zuckerberg said he did, adding that he doesn't "think about going public ... much."
He said he did not have a date in mind for a potential IPO.
The company does not disclose financial data, though analyst estimates for its 2009 revenue range from $500 million to $650 million, primarily from selling online ads targeted at users.
"The advertising on these systems I think will get much more relevant than that in a lot of the other systems very quickly," Zuckerberg said of his company's advertising efforts. He cited a recent media report that said Facebook's roster of advertisers has increased by four times in the past year.
During the roughly 50-minute on-stage interview, Zuckerberg addressed a wide range of issues, and he dismissed previous reports that Facebook is developing a web-based email service to compete with Yahoo and Google's Gmail.
"We're working on a number of things, but we're not building a webmail competitor," said Zuckerberg.
He noted that he was more interested in short-form messaging technology, like the 160-character text messages that mobile phone users increasingly zap to each other.
