The Wall Street Journal is spilling some beans on what to expect from this Thursday's upcoming Facebook event, cutely dubbed F8 (as in the G8 Summit). Apparently Facebook plans to throw open its doors to just about anyone in a move that could help them become the go-to guy in social networking - yes, even ahead of that small site MySpace.

Basically it sounds like Facebook is going to allow companies to be a part of the site on the development end. Companies will be able to build parts of the site and gain access to Facebook's 20+ million members, while Facebook will seemingly get to keep any revenue earned from site expansion and ads.

Without more details, it's unclear if such an openness will be beneficial or detrimental to the site's users, but even if it were the latter I highly doubt it would stop the rapid growth (they're gaining over 100,000 new users a day!).

One week ago I wrote:

I have absolutely no doubt now that Facebook can and will make it on their own (if they choose to) and years from now we'll look back at their pre-IPO days as a how-to for start-ups looking to become multi-billion dollar empires. (Am I going too far there?)

This move takes me another step towards thinking that I am not in fact going too far with such a statement. Facebook is clearly thinking bigger picture here (even founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shuns the label "social networking" if favor of "social utility").

Google thought bigger pictures as well. Their stock can now be had for about $470 a share.