THIS past few weeks it finally happened. The whole tech and investment community was waiting for Facebook to sell shares in the company and this past few days they filed for their initial public offering.

This has been expected for quite a while but one thing that was unsure was what the aim was with the offering. It is now known that with this initial offering Facebook aims to earn about 5 billion US dollars. This may sound like a lot of money (and it is) but this is only for 5% of the company. Last year Facebook made a profit of about 1 billion US dollars. This is the profit after all deductions. If I had loads of money lying around I would be buying some stock. Is the company worth this much? At this very moment I would say yes, but I cannot be sure about the value in a year. We all believed that MySpace would be the biggest website and no other website could ever take over that number one spot. But now very few of us even have a MySpace page. In a matter of months MySpace was overshadowed by Facebook.

With almost half of all people who are online actually having a Facebook profile I do believe that the website to dethrone Facebook as the most popular social network would have to be incredible. I think it will take a while, but it could happen. For now I think it is a great investment and you will make a lot of money, but keep your eye on new technologies, some new technology that is being developed by some 17- or 18-year-old child may change everything in a year or two. And that young person could be the creator of the next greatest network we have ever seen.