To play the devil's advocate, has anyone been on a college campus lately?
There's no more asking for numbers. You meet someone and then you look them up on Facebook after you get back. That's it. You get their name and everything else is on Facebook. Everyone, except the social outcasts and the hermits, is on Facebook.
MySpace is for the pre-college or no-college crowd. As soon as a HSer gets their college email address, they register for Facebook immediately.
The only question now is will the college grads continue to use Facebook and there is evidence that they are bringing their Facebook accounts over to business and corporate life.
This phenomenon may be hard to understand for those that never had Facebook in college, myself included. Facebook currently dominates the college social life and unless they are incredibly stupid, they will expand to try to offer a complete platform for every aspect of a college student's life. Whether that be ordering food (seamlessweb, freshdirect, and etc) or ordering books (amazon, b&n) or checking out college courses (already a facebook app) or carpooling home for thanksgiving (FB app), it can and will all be done on Facebook.
Why is it growing so fast? Because it's just better than anything else out there and has achieved critical mass. It'll be very very hard to unseat the market leader here. Maybe if they make a mistake like LinkedIn and start selling information and access to recruiters who started cold calling me at work, will someone have a chance.
Whether or not it's worth 15 billion, only the insiders know the real numbers. The only information we have to go on is the 'leaked' project Faternity docs from last year.
