Facebook announced that it hit 200 million users today and Chief Operating Officer Cheryl Sandberg made a blog post describing some of the data mining that the company is doing of those connections. It's going to be great for advertisers, she says, it should also be very good for the rest of us as well. I think it's creepy.

It's all about "The Stream." The conversations we have in public parts of the site, the items we interact with in our Facebook Newsfeeds, and the way that builds connections between a larger group of people. Here at ReadWriteWeb we're very excited about social networking, real time feeds, network effects and the like. But this Facebook ethos has gone far enough that it's time to question whether there's something cult-like going on.

Sociologist Robert J. Lifton wrote an outline several decades ago of what makes some groups considered "cults." There are some parallels with the way Facebook is working these days.

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all.