Facebook confirmed that it expects to announce its 500-millionth user next week, and will mark the occasion with a new consumer marketing initiative called “Facebook Stories.” 
 
 Last week, BoomTown got wind of the effort–which will center on a variety of life stories from users about the impact of the social networking site on their lives–and asked Facebook about it. 
 
 The company said it was readying its launch for next week and put Randi Zuckerberg on the horn to tell me the story behind “Stories.” 
 
 “As we anticipated our 500-million milestone, and we wanted to find a different way to announce and celebrate it,” said Zuckerberg, who has spearheaded the site’s creation, in an interview this afternoon. “In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones, and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users.” 
 
 Getting to the 500-million mark, though, is a big deal for the Silicon Valley-based Facebook, which has been growing wildly over the last several years across the globe. 
 
 While the number has been widely expected to be announced soon, it will still be a big landmark in the history of the company. 
 
 Thus, a Web site within Facebook that is a visualization of some of the many kinds of consumer stories the company has collected over the years, but never showed off. 
 
 The stories will have two views–organized by by geographical location and by theme, such as “finding love,” “coping with grief” and “natural disasters.” 
 
 Facebook has seeded the selection with about 200 text stories it has, asking users again for permission to feature them. 
 
 But the point is to open the page up to all users to submit their tale in 420 characters, the same number as a status update on Facebook. The story can also be linked to the user’s profile. 
 
 Users can also “Like” stories, and the most popular will be featured. The site will also be optimized for the other devices, such as the Apple (AAPL) iPad and Amazon (AMZN) Kindle. 
 
 The site was designed by two outside firms, social marketing company Involver and JESS3, a design, branding and data visualization firm. 
 
 Zuckerberg, who said she would be adding her own story, said her favorite so far has been the story of a group that coalesced on Facebook to save an old theater in Kentucky. 
 
 But she is hoping for a varied collection that will appeal to, well, the soon-to-be 500 million people on Facebook. 
 
 “We really think by surfacing these stories, users can explain what Facebook is a lot better than we can,” said Zuckerberg. 
 
 Before the launch of “Facebook Stories” next week, you can start the tale-telling now here, using a newly tweaked form, pictured below (click on it to make image larger): ||||| Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
 
 
 On Feb. 4, 2004, in his Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, a website where college students could post information about themselves, trade messages, and become virtual “friends” with one another. It was entering an already-crowded field of social networks. Friendster was the world’s most popular at the time, but it was about to be overtaken by a one-year-old upstart called MySpace. Google had launched Orkut just weeks earlier. 
 
 Will Oremus Will Oremus is Slate’s senior technology writer. Email him at will.oremus@slate.com or follow him on Twitter. 
 
 Facebook was different because it was only for college students, featured a clean layout devoid of spam, and had no immediate plans to make money. It was an instant hit. “I assume I’ll eventually make something profitable,” Zuckerberg shrugged in a June 2004 interview with the Harvard student newspaper. (It took him a while, but Facebook turned its first profit in 2009, and last year it reported a profit of some $1.5 billion on nearly $8 billion in revenues.) 
 
 By December the site had 1 million users, and it hadn’t even added its photo-upload feature yet. Here’s what thefacebook.com looked like in 2005, a year after it launched: 
 
 Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
 Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
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 Over the years it piled on the features. Some, like News Feed and the like button, changed the Internet forever. Others, like Facebook Gifts, not so much. For its 10th birthday, Facebook has put together a timeline of significant events in its own history. It reflects a bit of a selective memory—you won’t find Gifts, Beacon, or the site’s short-lived experiment with democracy on this timeline. But then, that’s part of what made Facebook so appealing in the first place: the ability to edit your own image to your liking. 
 
 Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
 The timeline is one of several features that Facebook released Monday night, on the eve of its anniversary. On Tuedsay it will unveil a product called “A Look Back” that lets users make a personal movie or slideshow of their favorite moments in their lives since they joined Facebook. The company also launched a slick new iPhone app, Paper, in the App Store on Monday. 
 
 
 
 Here’s Zuckerberg’s statement on the eve of his brainchild’s 10th birthday: 
 
 It's been an incredible journey so far, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it. It's been amazing to see how people have used Facebook to build a real community and help each other in so many ways. In the next decade, we have the opportunity and responsibility to connect everyone and to keep serving the community as best we can. 
 
 Advertisement ||||| The company is being sued for $15bn - almost as much as the $16bn raised in its record breaking initial public offering - for tracking users against their wishes, even after they have logged out of their Facebook accounts. 
 
 The lawsuit, filed today in a Federal Court in San Jose, California, combines 21 separate cases across the US and could have far-reaching ramifications for the social network at a critical time. 
 
 Facebook priced its flotation at $38 a share last night, valuing the company founded by 28-year old Mark Zuckerberg at $104bn. It will begin trading at 4pm today, shortly after the opening of the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. 
 
 As a public company, Facebook will be expected to grow its advertising revenues very rapidly, putting it under considerable pressure to collect more and more user data to help it target its ads. 
 
 The company made 85pc of its $3.71bn of revenues from advertising last year but that figure appears paltry in the context of Facebook’s extraordinary reach. The social network has 900m users worldwide. 
 
 Many analysts and experts are sceptical about the effectiveness of paid-for advertising on Facebook. 
 
 Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the world’s biggest advertising group, WPP, has said he has “fundamental” doubts over whether Facebook provides the right “context” for ads, and earlier this week General Motors, the US car manufacturer, said it would stop buying ads on the social network. 
 
 However, Facebook argues that its ability to carefully target its adverts makes them increases their value. If, for example, a female user changes her relationship status to “engaged”, Facebook is able to tap into that and ensure lots of adverts for wedding dresses and other bridal services appear on her Facebook page. 
 
 If the claimants are successful in their $15bn case against Facebook, they could prevent Facebook from collecting so much data and severely impede its ability to grow advertising revenues. 
 
 “This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications,” said David Straite, a partner at Stewarts Law, the US law firm that is representing the companies in the class-action lawsuit.
– Facebook has crossed the 1 billion mark, Mark Zuckerberg announced today in an appearance on the Today show in which he nonetheless acknowledged that his 8-year-old company is "in a tough cycle now." The milestone means that one in every seven people uses the site, notes Fast Company, but the heat is on for Facebook to find a way to better monetize its service, and it's got a new plan: Charge US users to promote certain posts. The $7 service, currently being tested, would give users pride of place on their friends' news feeds. That price could change, says a rep. Some are skeptical of the policy: Would users be willing to pay for a key aspect of Facebook? "I know it’s just a test, but it doesn’t send the right message," says an analyst. "Charging for something so generic doesn’t make sense." New Zealand and other countries, however, have had the pay-to-promote service for months. Zuckerberg today posted a note of thanks to users over the 1 billion milestone.