Facebook.com is set to make a big announcement this Thursday, May 24th.   The Wall Street Journal and Cnet speculate that this announcement will bring another level of social media to the networking giant.

“On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.”

One quote in particular gives me the feeling that Facebook would like to become more of a content aggregator and/or publisher instead of a social networking website:

“Mr. Zuckerberg in the past has acknowledged he has greater ambitions for Facebook. He has bristled at Facebook’s “social networking” tag, instead calling the site a “social utility” that helps people share information, with their personal connections with each other as a backdrop. If others build services to take advantage of those connections, Facebook can become more useful for its users, he said in the March interview.”

Sound familar to Myspace News?  Hopefully not….as far as I know, Myspace News hasn’t really taken off since its launch.

Steve O’Hear at ZDNet.com and Paidcontent.org discuss how Facebook.com will become a platform on which companies can provide services within the Facebook pages.   Using this platform a company, or entertainer, or individual may be able to leverage their network to share content, or a product, or an offer, etc.  Of course this is all speculation at this point.

One of these options does seem like a reasonable next step for Facebook.com.  They are growing at an incredible rate, but if you don’t continue to improve your site and evolve you’ll eventually fade away.

On a seperate but related issue, what do you think of them rejecting acquisition offers and opting to stay private?  Do you think they have what it takes to go the distance?  They just seem so ripe for a buyout by a huge media company or Google.