There has been a huge spotlight on the net’s fastest growing social utility, Facebook. 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg initially made Facebook available to people only in Harvard – where he went to college. It was then introduced to all colleges, high schools, some comanies, and now everyone. Today there are 150,000 people signing up daily, growing three times faster than rival MySpace. Facebook receives 40 billion page views a month from its existing 30 million users. About 10-15 percent of Canada’s population is on the site (as per CEO Zuckerberg himself). Investors are asking about a potential IPO, buyouts, mergers, and appraising how much the site is worth. The question I ask – Is Facebook’s growth is sustainable?

Facebook shows no sign of slowing down, and Zuckerberg shows no signs of exiting. Most recently, Yahoo bid $1-billion for the site. The offer was turned down. The company also recently hired its cheif marketing officer – Chamath Palihapitiya (raised in Canada, holds an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo). Facebook seems to be attempting to meet its growing demand by itself. Many took these as signs of the company’s intentions of going public.

Whether Facebook’s growth is sustainable remains to be seen. Many other fast-growing social networks (Friendster, Hi5, etc.) have cooled down, and left the scene. Facebook is trying other methods to make itself more useful. Their usefulness will now be put to the test. If Facebook does not hit the stock market in a Google-like fashion, don’t be surprised to see Zuckerberg and his investors on the streets mourning the day they turned down Yahoo’s $1-billion takeover bid.