Since Facebook was launched nearly eight years ago in an East Coast dorm at one of America's elite institutions, the social network has transformed into one of the most powerful Internet companies on the planet.
Facebook is nowhere near done growing.
Like Alexander the Great, the social network wants to conquer the world – the Web universe to be more precise.
"There are more than 2 billion global Internet users .... and we aim to connect all of them," Facebook declared Wednesday in a regulatory filing announcing its planned initial public offering to raise $5 billion.
As of Dec. 31, 2011, Facebook had 845 million monthly active users, 483 million daily active users and more than 100 billion connections, according to the filing. Facebook wants to make hundreds of millions of other connections, including in developing countries like India, the Asia Pacific region and places that aren't currently supportive of an open and free Internet, namely China where access to Facebook is restricted.
Although the idea for Facebook germinated while its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and some fellow students were obtaining an Ivy League education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., the social network is actually more ubiquitous in some countries outside the U.S. Facebook estimates penetration rates of 80+ percent of Internet users in Chile, Turkey and Venezuela. That's significantly higher than in the U.S. and U.K. where the company estimates comparable penetration rates of roughly 60 percent, revealed Facebook, whose "mission is to make the world more open and connected."
"There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future," Zuckerberg said in a letter accompanying the Securities and Exchange Commission filing. "The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem that we can focus on."
Trying to connect the whole world is a lofty goal, but if Facebook manages to raise $5 billion in what is expected to be one of the biggest IPOs in recent years, its aspirations might not seem so out of reach.
