Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Wednesday as it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service, hatched in a Harvard dormitory room nearly eight years ago, is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.

In its filing, Facebook, which has more than 845 million users worldwide, said it was seeking to raise $5 billion, according to a figure used to calculate the registration fee. The company will seek to have the ticker “FB” for its shares, but did not list an exchange.

But many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that would value it near $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Labs, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor.

…The filing sheds some light on how its meteoric run has turned the upstart into a formidable money-maker. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising and the sale of virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.7 billion last year, a 88 percent increase from the prior year. During that period, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion. It is still a fraction of the size of rival Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion last year, but many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct more and more capital to the Web’s social hive.

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