World Domination, that’s what they’re after. And money. Can’t have one without the other, you know.
The way they plan to get both is through owning your soul (or, at least, all of your personal data, your eyeballs and your friends and that’s really just as good as a soul to them).
Bad juju lies in that direction, people. The Beacon and terms-0f-service issues show you where they want to go, they just have to find the right way to sneak it up on it.
Also, their plan as a whole is questionable. There’s the little problem (as mentioned also in the story comments) that my circle of friends is nearly useless for most of the things that I need to know about in a “now” kind of way. Sorry, Facebook, but you lose to Google’s big ol’ index of publicly-available knowledge for everything except “what was the name of that restaurant you were talking about last week?”. If I need the syntax for some command in the Windows API, posting it up on my “wall” and hoping one of my programmer friends happens to check and respond to it is a whopping big “fail” of a plan.