Despite recent studies spelling doom for Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly has his sights on building a worldwide social media platform and upending the tech industry. How will Zuckerberg take over the world? Efficiency.

Sure, efficiency is a dry, technical matter. It's not a sexy subject, and Zuckerberg isn't a Bond villain with an audacious plan. He's not Google, with mystery barges, stratospheric internet balloons, and plans for a robot workforce. But through efficiency in computing, the topic he talked about Tuesday at a meeting of his Open Compute Project, Zuckerberg may succeed.

The Open Compute Project was founded by Zuckerberg three years ago as a foundation of engineers around the world looking to reinvent how the infrastructure of the internet works.

The community -- which includes engineers from Intel, IBM, Cisco, and now Microsoft, as well as others from universities and businesses around the world -- works on making the most efficient server, storage, and data center hardware and software, openly sharing their ideas, to make the underpinning technologies that drive the internet more simple, cost-efficient, energy-efficient, and scalable.

Essentially it's an ongoing hackathon to make the kinds of things the internet does cheaper, simpler -- generally more efficient. Sounds archaic and boring, right? It's not -- not if you can see what Zuckerberg and Facebook have done, and are in the process of doing, with it.

Facebook's Growth

Facebook may be ten years old, but it only became a big internet company in the last few years (even more recently, it became a public company). That's after Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had been dominant internet businesses for years. As The New York Times' bits blog puts it, "Facebook got big after those other companies had all built proprietary global computing systems." That is, the big IT companies had great infrastructure set up, locked up in secret as intellectual property.

Facebook needed the internet "guts" for a rapidly growing social media platform, and it got it through Open Compute, which basically created an open source plethora of data, computing, storage, and communications solutions that were innovative, time-saving, cost-effective, and free of proprietary burdens.

"Who wouldn't want a cheaper, more efficient server?" said Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design at Facebook to The New York Times. "The problem we're solving is much larger than Facebook's own challenges. There is a massive amount of data in the world that people expect to have processed quickly." At Tuesday's Open Compute meeting, Facebook VP for infrastructure, Jay Parikh, said the company has saved $1.2 billion in costs over the last three years. "It's not just about saving money, we're saving a ton of money," said Parikh according to the Times.

Open Compute, Internet.org, and the Rest of the World

A recent example of Open Compute's experimental mentality is a storage system that can hold a petabyte (more than a million gigabytes) of information using 10,000 Blu-ray discs. The storage solution is still a prototype, but Facebook might still use it if it's cost-efficient enough.

But Zuckerberg's push for open collaboration and efficiency goes beyond making new, cheap internet infrastructure hardware with Open Compute. He's taken the same way of thinking to Internet.org, a collaborative initiative between Facebook and several IT companies to expand the mobile web to developing countries, like in Latin America (and find new first-time Facebook users). As Bits Blog puts it, "that's probably a $1 trillion business."

Basically, Zuckerberg has more than a billion people connected to Facebook, and now wants to connect billions more (i.e., to take over the world).  

Idealistic tone of the internet.org video aside, the (edited) quote from John F. Kennedy is apropos: Zuckerberg's worldwide initiative is all about pragmatism. He's doing it through partnering with developing-world carriers and subsidizing internet data, creating new chip designs (both in Open Compute and Internet.org) that take half the energy to run, improving internet infrastructure with open source Open Compute-hacked hardware, and lowering the amount of data required for internet apps. The last initiative has its roots in "Facebook For Every Phone," a Facebook app for feature (not smart) phones that's little-known in the developed world, but has over 100 million users across the world.

Open Compute, Internet.org, Facebook's open source hackathon mentality, and a focus on efficiency may not sound like the sci-fi future of a connected globe, but it's a practical way to get it done. "If we really want to connect seven billion people, we're going to have to work together," said Parikh. "I don't see it working any other way."