Facebook is a poster-child for exponential-growth Silicon Valley startups, and it has been furiously innovating and morphing its product over the last 5 years. About a year ago, it reached that critical mass where your parents and grandparents start being aware of its existence and even mentioning it in every day conversations. Some might even be fortunate enough to now be Facebook friends with your Mother-in-law, as I am.

When web applications start to reach the 'rest of the world' is usually when things start getting seriously profitable. And there we are, with TechCrunch first reporting just last September that Facebook had become profitable, with a whopping 300 million users. I think it's safe to say that it has reached that critical mass.

The thing is, there is a cost to having that many people as a source of your income. If you start rocking the boat in any direction you're going to piss off some portion of your users. Facebook is still operating under the 'must grow' mindset, but doing that starting with almost half a billion users isn't exactly easy. The going only gets tougher and yet the show must go on. So how do you keep growing?

Well to grow profits you can either increase margins or increase volume. In this case it's becoming harder and harder to reach the remaining 6.5 billion of humans who are not yet plugged in (but they show 2 year olds using iPads now so fingers crossed for BabyFacebook), so there goes volume. And so they figure that the obvious answer is to milk your existing user-base for more cash than you previously were (margins). Queue Facebook's 'Web where the default is social' master plan.

Now there are plenty of gripes already with the substance of Facebook's recent changes, but perhaps the deeper problem is that there are so many changes to begin with. Small tweaks are great. Gradual usability improvements are essential to any product or service. But complete site overhauls where logging in forces you to choose privacy settings?

Here is a different idea: Facebook needs to stop pushing so hard for constant change and innovation. Big brand names need to be predictable and trusted. I think Facebook still has a lot of room to grow, but what it needs is not so much new features but rather just for time to go by. There are still plenty of people who would love the site if they tried it but haven't been sufficiently peer-pressed by their relatives. There are still entire segments of consumers who don't have reliable internet access. There are still people who have not yet warmed up to the idea of social networks themselves.

What Facebook is currently doing instead is basically sacrificing trust for revenue, which wouldn't be so bad from a business perspective if the added revenue from the users who stay offsets the loss of the users who drop out. Only this is a social network we're talking about. Building the network is the game. If you start breaking it up, you don't just lose points, you lose the very ground you stand on.

The true value of Facebook is the connections it allows you to have with people you wouldn't otherwise be connected to. It is the very fabric of what is making it so popular. It's what no other social site has. You stay on Facebook because there are people you just wouldn't know how to each otherwise. The scarier the site is to whoever is furthest connected to you, the lesser the value of it to the people in the middle of the network.