holy crap, facebook, you are god.

Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook

and that $240 million is for a 1.6% stake in the company.

The Microsoft investment throws the value of the holdings of Facebook investors into the stratosphere. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old Facebook founder who dropped out of Harvard to build the company, owns a 20 percent share which is now valued at $3 billion. Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005 and owns 11 percent of Facebook, now holds stock worth $1.65 billion.

can you imagine getting into this at the bottom? any chance any of those guys are single? or girls. whatever.

and now that facebook has established ridiculous dominance in the social networking world, and only looks to grow even more, let's pontificate on what will be the ultimate downfall of the holy roman empire. some ideas:

1. one of the ideas that has gone into play is that microsoft or facebook or whoever will target ads to what you write in your profile. so, if "mariah carey" is in your "favorite music," the ads on your screen will show you albums from jojo or janet jackson or rihanna or whoever the hot new R&B thing is. this can be applied to almost any section of your profile.
it is also really creepy and could completely turn people off. it feels cheap and intrusive and very sell-out-ish. then again, gmail does it(reads your email and displays relevant ads), and their growth doesn't seem to be stopping.

2. maybe facebook is a phase. maybe as we all get older, we really won't use facebook anymore. maybe when we have kids, we'll become old and grumpy and talk to our friends on the phone and write long e-mails once a month to catch up. as we fall off the social networking radar and don't see the point in cleverly proving our friendship on fb walls, a new site will grab the attention of a younger generation, eventually making fb users a dying breed (literally). kind of like newspapers.

3. facebook changes so much it becomes unrecognizable. too many ads, too many colors, too many features. who knows what, but for some reason, zuckerberg decides to change something, and people just can't stand it anymore.

anyone else have theories on the downfall of facebook? it could be 2 years, 5 years or 20 years from now.

i personally think #2 is most likely, but it won't happen for quite a while. there are already high-schoolers obsessed with it, and their zeal should carry on well through college. i think myspace has had its time in the sun, but facebook's longevity will prove to be much more impressive.