According to Forbes, Facebook is about to throw open it’s doors to rest of the world.

"The company had planned to announce and launch this expanded registration Tuesday but has delayed the expansion as it sorts through the backlash from changes it made to the site Sept. 5. "

This sounds like a good thing for Microsoft, which inked a 3 year advertising deal recently with Facebook.com.  However, there are problems with a social network going public:

"Facebook could be hurt when users start drawing comparisons to MySpace," says Fred Stutzman, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, who studies Facebook’s use among that university’s students. "There’s a backlash with every change at Facebook–but this is now the point of no return."

"……Yet Facebook still has less than half the users MySpace had when News Corp. bought the company last year, and revenues are still small–an estimated $30 million a year compared with MySpace’s roughly $180 million–says eMarketer senior analyst Debra Williamson."