Facebook’s Prospects May Rest on Trove of Data

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, has managed to amass more information about more people than anyone else in history. Now what? As Facebook turns to Wall Street in the biggest public offering ever by an Internet company, it faces a new, unenviable test: how to keep growing and enriching its hungry new shareholders. The answer lies in what Facebook will be able to do — and how quickly — with its crown jewel: its status as an online directory for a good chunk of the human race, with the names, photos, tastes and desires of nearly a billion people. In the eight years since it sprang out of a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has signed up users at breakneck speed, kept them glued to the site for longer stretches of time and turned a profit by using their personal information to customize the ads they see. Whether it can spin that data into enough gold to justify a valuation of as much as $104 billion remains unclear.