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Facebook and Microsoft announced today that they are expanding their partnership to the tune of a $240 million investment for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook that values the social network at $15 billion. Not bad for the three-year-old company, one that is expected to bring in only about $150 million in revenue this year. I’ll let you digest that for a minute; we all knew that’s what Facebook wanted to be valued at, but I know all of you were thinking the same thing I was: no way anyone else is going to buy that.

Regardless, this is what Microsoft is hoping will be a staggering blow to Google, who reportedly was also courting Facebook for a similar deal. Unfortunately, while this will have a significant impact on the online advertising market, and no doubt is a boon to Facebook, it is in no way a watershed moment amongst the major players in the online ad market. What today’s events really serve as is a public marriage ceremony between Microsoft and Facebook. Microsoft is one of the last of the major players to not have a social network that can be considered in any way successful, and they already ran advertising on Facebook's site in the US.

One of the benefits of the relationship will be a significant increase in the number of eyeballs to whom Microsoft can serve advertisements. According to statistics released in the press call today, the number is supposedly increasing by 250,000 active users per day. Even independently observed statistics of Facebook prove impressive: Hitwise ranks Facebook as the ninth most visited website in the US, with year-over-year growth of 102%.

All that, on its own, sounds like compelling set of facts leading up to a Microsoft/Facebook advertising juggernaut. I mean, after all, isn’t Facebook’s ultimate goal to become the web-based operating system? What’s synonymous with operating system if not Microsoft?

Let’s talk about how all that traffic gets there for a second while we cool our jets. According to Hitwise, 6.82% of US traffic to Facebook comes from Google (according to Hitwise). As Facebook’s publicly index-able content grows, by virtue of their business model, so does the monetizable content of Google’s search results. My point? Not necessarily a closed pie we’re talking about. Social networking growth isn’t expected to level off for another five years (which in Internet years is something like a decade or so).

While we’re talking about pies and how open they are, what about Google’s intent to “out-open” Facebook in social networking? The word on the street is (and this is confirmed off the record by folks I’ve spoken to at Google) that the real work on social networking is going to make Orkut look like a local opening band when compared to the headliner they debut on November 5th, and the chances are you’re already using several key parts of what will end up being integral components to the new Google social network (GMail, GTalk, Google Docs, etc).

Analyst Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray may have said it best: “[Microsoft and Facebook have] been beaten by Google since the beginning of time. They may want to make a statement that they aren’t going to sit on the sidelines.”

Ultimately, what I think we’ll be looking at will be good for the consumer as well as the advertising and web platform market: a little bit of competition. Quite honestly, I’ve got my qualms with the way Facebook is developing. I know they want to be a web-based OS and development platform, but there are issues that need to be taken seriously and dealt with before they can move on to that plateau. Likewise, Google’s advertising platform is often riddled with problems experienced by not only the end-user but sometimes even the advertisers and content producers. Lighting a fire under Google to innovate a bit more in that arena isn’t what I’d consider a bad thing.

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