(Image source: TechDrink )

BY EVAN THOMAS

On Tuesday - Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave his first interview since the social network’s IPO, when he spoke with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. Question number one: how about that stock price?

Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook’s share price wasn’t a glittering success right off the bat — but also said immediate returns aren’t everything .

“The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing.… We’re going to do things that we think are going to build value over the long term.”

But long-term improvement isn’t without its false starts . Zuckerberg said Facebook bet the wrong way when it poured development time into web-based versions of mobile Facebook, coded with HTML5.

“We burned two years. It’s really painful. I think probably we will look back on it saying that that is one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake we’ve made. But we’re coming out of that now.”

The Verge reports Facebook’s plan is to focus on the custom versions of its mobile applications. A native iOS app already exists, and an Android version is in the works.

“We're betting completely on it," he said, referring to native apps. "Native is going to be the approach that we go with for iOS and Android."

Facebook is also putting some serious thought into search . Zuckerberg says there’s already a team at Facebook investigating the potential of a native search engine.

And VentureBeat says, if search were to get traction, Facebook might be able to solve some of its revenue problems .

“Facebook search opens up a new advertising opportunity for the company, that is search is made into its own entity — not just a drop down box over your profile, but a whole separate page. Facebook could serve ads that are targeted more than extremely well to people’s interests…”

Or Facebook could build more mobile ads into those new native apps. There’s certainly an audience, if mobile access numbers are to be believed, but SlashGear points out the formula for monetization is thus far elusive .

“The question now is: how will Facebook make that significant amount of money from mobile ads? That has yet to be fully answered, but after this talk, it at least seems that Facebook is heading in the right direction.”