Facebook may be getting some new friends.

The social network site will likely either disclose its financial results or hold an initial public offering by April 2012 in what will be the biggest start-up tech company auction in history, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Facebook will be forced to go public due to federal law, which demands the company release its financials when it reaches 500 shareholders – a number the site is on the brink of hitting. Though shares have not yet been made available to the public, the company already has a significant number of private investors.

If Facebook does file for an IPO, it means the incredibly secretive company will be forced to unveil its inner financial workings – in particular, cash flow, quarterly financials and how the business has grown since its days as a fledgling Harvard start-up.

The best part for Facebook enthusiasts or excited investors: if the company goes through a traditional IPO auction, it will allow everyone who ponies up money to buy a piece of the site.

While that news may be interesting for potential investors, it will be of little consequence to the millions of Facebook users who just want to update their statuses, said David Stowell, a clinical professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“I think [Facebook users are] agnostic to what happens, other than going public gives the company more access to capital,” Stowell told the Daily News. “And with the capital raised, it can be used to fund [research and development] and expand features for users.”

That’s only if everything goes according to plan – companies have been known to use their new influx of cash to make bad decisions, Stowell cautioned, like many of the dot-com bubble companies that went broke in the famed downfalls of the 90s and early 2000s.

The auction is not official yet, but it’s already drawing numerous comparisons to the auction of another tech giant and Facebook’s favorite frenemy: Google – which was also forced to auction reluctantly in 2004.

“If there’s a certain amount of investor holding and trading interest, there is sometimes an imperative to do an IPO as imposed by the SEC before a company may be ready … case in point was Google,” said Stowell. “I think Google felt some pressure [from the SEC] and they might not have done the offering quite so early.”

But the prospect of how much money Mark Zuckerberg could soon be worth should lessen any queasiness about going public for the young billionaire.

At $50 billion right now, Facebook is valued to be the most valuable tech company to ever hit the market (Google came in at a mere $27 billion).

“I expect there’ll be tremendous demand; it will be oversubscribed,” said Stowell. “And good things will happen.”

(Source: NY Daily News)