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Facebook is looking to add some new friends in the near future, as it filed papers for an official public offering on Wednesday that it hopes will raise $5 billion.

According to papers filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company will be listed on an unspecified exchange as "FB."

"There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter that accompanied the filing. "The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

"We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other."

The company said it does not intend to pay dividends "in the foreseeable future."

The filing lifted the lid on some of the private company's tightly controlled secrets, including revenues.

The filing reported that Facebook pulled in $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, nearly double the $1.97 billion in revenue the company generated in 2010.

If Facebook meets its fundraising target, it would mark the largest Internet IPO since Google Inc. raised $1.9 billion in 2004.

Once IPO papers are filed with the SEC, it typically takes between three and four months for the stock to start trading.

Since Facebook was created in a Harvard University dormitory in 2004, the so-called social network has grown to include 845 million active users, according to the filing.

Technology analyst Carmi Levy said the company had no choice but to go public as its main rival, Google, attempts to catch up in the social-media sphere.

"Facebook is in the dogfight of its life against Google for what has to be the very future of the Internet," Levy told Â鶹ӰÊÓ Channel Wednesday evening.

"It needs resources, it needs to go public in order to have access to a cash trove, in this case $5 billion, so that it can fund the best developers, the biggest data centres, the resources that it needs to grow in scale and really take on Google at a level that it hasn't done before."

Levy said that while Google has "tried and failed" many times to be relevant in social media, its Google+ service has 90 million users and growing and is desperate to prevent this latest venture from crashing.

"Google needs to catch up because the Internet is transitioning from a search-based paradigm to social-based paradigm," Levy said. "And Google leads search, Facebook leads social. And if Google doesn't close that gap, it could be irrelevant as the Internet heads into its social-based future."

Despite its meteoric success, however, Facebook's decision to sell its stock on the open market has left some investors wondering whether they should buy in.

"The debate on Wall Street is raging right now as to whether this is going to be something that you like," BNN's Michael Kane said Wednesday morning.

Kane explained that the initial shares could be priced on a price-to-sales ratio 497 times higher than Apple's.

"Is anyone going to want to buy something that is, apparently, so over-valued," Kane wondered in an interview with Â鶹ӰÊÓ Channel.

"After the first day you could see it really, really go south and anybody who buys in could lose a lot of money," he said, recalling the trend that accompanied the highest-profile Internet IPOs in 2011.

But Reena Aggarwal, the Robert E. McDonough Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Finance at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., is confident Facebook's case is different.

"This is a company that actually does have revenue, it's a company that actually has profits, and they're growing at a good pace," Aggarwal told Â鶹ӰÊÓ Channel.

Even if investors decide Facebook warrants such a high share price, Kane says they're still left to decide whether there's any room for the value to go up.

Unlike other tech companies that make their first public offering to fund a brand new product or process, Facebook is not known for its innovation or new ideas.

"Facebook is already well known, so there are going to be a lot of people that are shy about investing in something that may not be a game changer," Kane said.

Levy said going public does not ensure the company's future health.

"It needs to learn to grow up and it needs to learn to grow up fast. If it doesn't, if it missteps, clearly it could end up the next MySpace, it could end up the next Friendster," he said. "There's no guarantee that Facebook's going to turn all of this promise into a very long-term, stable future."