Whenever the New York Times or Time Magazine say you are important and are peaking, you can bet the opposite is about to happen. Read this article to see why I am concerned.

Facebook is hitting 200 million members with the majority of them being outside of the United States. It reminds me so much of the instant messaging growth patterns of AIM and ICQ back in the mid 90′s or - even before that - chat rooms and message boards on AOL.

Consumers love the service but it is near impossible to keep the scale going; the virality friction free; and at the same time make the service an advertising friendly business. Trust me. Been there done that!

There is something deeply personal and intimate about a friends and family based service. It is jarring to see non relevant ads served in my own personal space and without a great search business and money store created, CPM based sales to branded advertisers are hard to come by in a community based environment. Can you name one company that has won doing this kind of sale? I can’t.

Further when you have clumpy growth outside of the US, trying to find a way to monetize the inventory country by country is equally difficult. Who cares if you have 3 million Romanians on the service if you are selling a targeted product in the southern part of the UK and vice versa?

If I was leading Facebook, I wouldn’t be trying to make a media business out of the audience. Instead I would be focused on building a community based business, a friend to friend business. I would use eBay and PayPal as my model home to emulate and capitalize on ways for friends to do commerce with friends. Personal ads a la Craig’s List would also work. Creating a next generation white pages and yellow pages kind of model for this next generation communications dashboard could also scale well as would hyper local businesses and classifieds.

Facebook’s size is about to hurt it. It is generating massive expense and hasn’t unlocked a business model yet. The few companies that created a business model – AOL, Google, eBay and Amazon – all established a business model; then scaled; and THEN added additional revenue streams.

Facebook has the scale but still no business model. It has its expenses growing and, my bet, they are growing faster than the revenues. Color me nervous.