• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer, March 10, 2008

Facebook's ill-fated Beacon program continues to dog CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who apologized for the effort again, last night at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Tex.

"We probably got a little bit ahead of ourselves," Zuckerberg said, according to press accounts. "We came across as knowing more than we really knew."

Beacon, in its original form, shared information about people's purchases with other Facebook members. After weeks of protest, Facebook revamped the program to make it opt-in, and also gave users a way to permanently opt out of participating.

Zuckerberg last night acknowledged that users want to wield power over how information about them is shared. "Almost all of the mistakes we made, we didn't give people enough control," he said, according to Business Week. "We need to give people complete control over their information. The more control and the more granular the control, the more info people will share and the more we will be able to achieve our goals."

The comments were made in the course of an on-stage interview by Sarah Lacy from Business Week, which has itself been the subject of much analysis today. By most accounts, the audience grew impatient with her conversational style and started heckling her, while twittering negative reviews.

Still, for all the criticism, it sounds like Zuckerberg opened up somewhat on stage. For instance, he confirmed that Yahoo attempted to buy Facebook for $1 billion a few years ago and said there was disagreement within the company about whether to accept the offer, He also briefly addressed the company's finances, saying the business is "around breakeven" -- which is probably as much information as we're going to get, absent a public offering.