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There's no question that Facebook is the new "It Girl" of the social networking scene, and has been pretty much since it opened its network last fall (prior to that it was restricted to university students). You can tell by how quickly everyone from governments to school boards is trying to block access to it.

If Facebook was a Hollywood actress, it would probably be Lindsay Lohan. But has it been making the right career decisions, or is it just spending all its time partying without a care for the future?

Among other things, some observers wonder whether founder Mark Zuckerberg — a 23-year-old Harvard dropout — made the right decision by not selling out to Yahoo for a rumoured $1.6-billion (U.S.) last fall.

"They're not going to see that kind of money again," Jupiter Media analyst Emily Riley said at a recent industry conference. David Rittenhouse of advertising agency neo@Ogilvy chimed in that Mr. Zuckerberg and his team had missed "a big opportunity."

At the same time, however, Facebook has a pretty good track record of making smart decisions. For example, there was considerable controversy when the network opened itself up to non-students in September, but that move has paid off in spades.

According to Hitwise — an Internet traffic-monitoring firm — the site has doubled in size since it dropped the university requirement, with page views up by 106 per cent.

"Opening up to the entire Internet audience had a positive effect for Facebook," LeeAnn Prescott, director of research for Hitwise, said in a statement. That said, MySpace is still much larger with an estimated 80 per cent of all social networking traffic. Facebook has about 12 per cent.

Facebook's growth rate is also not the highest in the social-networking space, according to Hitwise. Bebo, a U.S.-based network that has a large proportion of users in Britain and other parts of Europe, saw its traffic climb by more than 180 per cent from last year.

Coincidentally, Yahoo is rumoured to be in acquisition talks with Bebo, with a price tag of $1-billion or so. Does Yahoo believe that Facebook's growth is peaking and a smaller network would be a better purchase? Or is it afraid that Facebook would cost too much at this point?

Either of those is possible. Some industry watchers have estimated that Facebook could be worth as much as $3-billion now. And there are still rumours that the site is looking at an initial public offering of stock in the near future.

For what it's worth, Facebook hasn't been acting like a company that is looking to sell out any time soon. The service has been rolling out new features that seem designed to extend the reach of its network and find new sources of revenue.

The latest of these is a classified advertising network, which will allow Facebook members to list and share items. A similar type of social advertising model has worked well for Craigslist, which gets millions of unique visitors a day.

Facebook was also expected to announce this week that it will be partnering with companies that want to reach its 14 million or so monthly users, in effect turning Facebook into a platform for outside content by using the site's API (application programming interface) to develop new services.

Michael Arrington, who covers the technology startup scene on his TechCrunch blog, has said he expects Facebook will do an IPO at some point next year.

That doesn't mean the acquisition route is necessarily out. Online-transaction company PayPal went public in 2002 and was eventually bought by eBay (PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is a leading investor in Facebook).

Is Facebook just another hot startup that will flame out the way Friendster did? Or is Mark Zuckerberg building something that could be the Google of social networks, and the hottest tech IPO since the search engine went public? Tens of millions — and potentially billions — of dollars are resting on the answers to those questions.