I'm helping out the local Vancouver Facebook Developer Garage event this coming Tuesday by running a "Future of Facebook" Q&A. Johnny Bufu of SXIP will be on hand to lend expertise around portable social networks, especially regarding identity, OpenID, the OpenID Attribute Exchange extension, and related tech.
The timing and title of this talk is interesting: there is an "all hands" meeting at Facebook on Tuesday, so the rep from Facebook that was supposed to attend can't make it. There is much speculation here, everything from "Microsoft will buy them" to "Facebook is worth $15 Billion". It will be fun to talk some of this through live at the event, but I'll mainly try and jockey live audience discussion, not do my own pontification.
It has been most interesting, with the "rise of Facebook", to see its vast spread into "non techies". Indeed, that's where *I've* found it to add real utility: since so many people are on there, both organizing events and seeing what people are up to "in the real world" has become much simpler, and has led to more in person meetings, for me at least. Pointing the way what a ubiquitous, interoperable identity infrastructure on the web could enable?
Some other preparatory material for such a discussion is this video of an interview of Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by John Batelle at the Web 2.0 Summit.The event is this Tuesday at VFS starting at 5:30pm, full event details on Facebook, of course :P