This just in from the WSJ.  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook Inc., issued an apology -- delivered via the company's blog -- for mistakes the company made in rolling out the Beacon advertising system.

In  a purely naked post Mr. Zuckerberg wrote "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. "We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."

With > 30 million users around the globe -- and with a newly minted $15 billion valuation -- Facebook is clearly the early favorite in the race to blend social networking with online advertising.

In a race like this -- i am not sure if it is better to be the favorite, or, the underdog?  Don't get me wrong, i'd kill to be in Facebook's shoes because they clearly have the scale and an amazing opportunity to define an entirely new game on the web.   That said, i think the beacon fiasco and the events of the past few weeks show that it is still very early days and Facebook's world domination is not going to come as easy as some people think.

So while it's definitely better to be the favorite -- i truly believe it is dangerous to under-estimate the underdogs, of which there are plenty of very large and capable players learning every step of the way from Facebook's good, and bad, moves.