Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), told reporters that he would not be surprised if Facebook remained independent. He also pointed out that the rise of social networks could be good for the big search company: "Social networks are creating lots and lots of content ... and that's more for us to search." Facebook now has almost 30 million active members, putting it behind News Corp's (NYSE: NWS) MySpace.

Brin's observation may simply be a factor of his own experience. Google could have been sold before it went public. Rumors are that Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) had strong interest. Instead, Google watched the price of its stock go from under $100 at the time of its IPO to $545 now. With a market cap of $170 billion, the founders have become wildly wealthy.

The question, of course, is whether social networking is the next search. Can the newest rage on the internet pull in really large investments from online marketers? Did Rupert Murdoch steal MySpace for $565 million?

It may be a year or two before it is clear that independence is the right move for Facebook. By then its founders will either be very rich or full of regret.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

MySpace may be the space of the moment, receiving praise, aplomb and (most importantly) generating traffic to Google in ever-greater numbers, but it's not even the middle of the social network craze. Really, the whole social network effect, as a theory and a technological practicality, started with the personal web sites of the early nineties. Personal web sites beget blogs beget networking sites like Orkut and LinkedIn beget MySpace, AIM Pages, YouTube, and whatever's to come next.

Thanks to a effort by white shoe management consultancy McKinsey to get the great minds of YouTube, Yahoo! and the like together with the old garde of the gigantic media (and I'm asking myself, and Aaron Cohen of Bolt Media, who was interviewed as a person of knowledge for the Financial Times piece: whither side of the old/new divide does Time Warner fall?), social networking is now coming into the good graces of the giants of Wall Street and Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all those places where fashion and money meet the people.

Robert Young, writing for GigaOm, calls MySpace the "it girl," and describes the infatuation with "her" and her groupies this way: "nearly every media company and venture capital fund on the planet is out on the dance floor stumbling over one another to see if they can identify the next breathless social networking beauty."