With the announcement this week, reported by the AP, that Facebook is planning to create a dual-class stock structure designed to keep control over the company in the hands of current shareholders (like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg); it's a move that Google made before it went public in 2004 to allow existing shareholders to maintain strategic control over the company while still allowing itself to be publicly traded, and it's a move that has industry analysts wondering how long it will be before Facebook decides to hold an IPO of its own.

Although Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has no immediate plans to go public, the creation of the dual-class stock structure, (which, in Google's particular case, gave "A Class" shareholders 10x the voting power per share as "B Class" shareholders, allowing them to exert considerably greater influence when voting on important decisions) certainly lays the foundation for a future IPO; Zuckerberg is notorious for his desire to maintain control over Facebook in terms of both its business and creative directions, and it's highly unlikely that he would consider an IPO in a traditional single-class stock structure.

Just what would happen if Facebook were to hold an IPO and go public? The short answer: a massive windfall for Facebook and its current investors. Facebook has survived on venture capital until now; since the company's founding over five years ago, Facebook has raised over $600 million from investors. This past spring, Facebook raised $200 million alone from Russian Internet investor Digital Sky Technologies in exchange for a 2% stake in the company; that means that Facebook's valuation was, at that time, approximately $10 billion.

Despite that high valuation; an IPO would likely send Facebook's value even higher, at least during the early stages of trading. Current shareholders, especially those who took part in the early stages of Facebook's fundraising, would stand to make billions of dollars in profits, and those fortunate enough to acquire shares during early trading would undoubtedly see significant profits.

That being said, such an IPO may either be around the corner or, potentially, indefinitely delayed. As long as Facebook continues to receive funding from investors and continues to firm up its business plans, they won't need to sell themselves publicly; despite not actually turning a profit, Facebook continues to attract funding both both domestic and foreign, and the closer they come to being profitable, the more attractive an investment they'll be. If they do actually hold an IPO, it'll undoubtedly be one of the largest and most exciting IPO's in the history of IT, and unquestionably the largest in the history of social networking.