Happy Birthday Facebook?

As many other sites will be reporting throughout the day, today is Facebook's 8th birthday. In these eight years Facebook has grown from being a project in a Harvard dorm room to the world's largest social network. Facebook now has over 845 million monthly active users. But where will it go from here?

Two days before this Facebook has filed to go public and has an implied valuation of $94 billion, higher than any previous valuation. This is with a share price of $40. However, with the current number of users already on Facebook people are wondering just how much room for growth there is.

Since the launch of Google+, Google has been promoting their new social network in as many ways as possible - including having Google+ results embedded into search results. The service was launched with many features not available in Facebook at that time, and since then they have only been trying to keep up.

Almost immediately after learning about Google+'s video hangouts Facebook launched their own less popular Skype video chat integration. Then, they finally tried to make it easier to put friends into groups (much like Google+ circles) with close friends and acquaintances. Another new features is the highly controversial timeline page. Now, they are testing a new design for photos that looks almost exactly like the Google+ implementation. One has to wonder whether Facebook has a need to take all great ideas from Google+ or whether this is a general evolution for social networks.