Facebook is rightly a social phenomenon that has taken the world by storm and great swathes of the populations of many countries spend large parts of their day updating and communicating on the platform.
But its humble beginnings as a forum for students at Harvard University form the foundations of why it has struggled in its adolescent years.
The favourite issue for City bankers, angel investors and the money boys in general, is just how do you monetise certain websites.
The question is harder at the beginning of a website when the huge traffic might not even be there, and the website is involved in a new concept, because making money has to be the end result; otherwise investors will leave, or re-label themselves as charities.
Take some of the greatest successes of the modern digital era such as Amazon and Google; and what perplexed many, including the numerous naysayers, was just how websites that were creating great concepts and absorbing great mounds of cash at the same time, how were they ever going to make money?
Well, Amazon and Google eventually began to show just how they were going to make money; so much money in fact that the naysayers have largely disappeared.
But Facebook, even with its millions of users and hoards of enthusiasts, still finds it hard to fully exploit its potential. It can monetise its activities only to a degree and that remains its next challenge; offering a full blown commercial model from a website that people still like to see as a social portal first, and an advertising medium second.