Though the recession may not be ending yet, there’s at least one company that won’t stop growing.

Facebook, the most popular social networking on the Web, is showing no signs of slowing in the face of an economic downturn, as founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that the company would be expanding its staff by up to 50% by the end of the year.

After breaking 250 million users last month, Facebook has cemented itself as a key character in the Internet community, consistently placing in the Top 5 Global Sites on Alexa, alongside search behemoths Google and Yahoo.

With 1,000 employees right now, the Palo Alto, CA-based company may swell its forces to 1,500 this year, taking full advantage of a surplus of Web engineers and programmers.

Facebook appears to already have some ideas in mind for further development of the Web site, what with its purchase of social networking site FriendFeed two weeks ago. Though that purchase was mostly Facebook’s way of picking up an elite group of programmers with trained minds and sharp eyes for real-time networking, the company may need to up its hiring numbers in the next few months to provide a substantial team that would back up the FriendFeed crew.

For those who might be inclined to think that the current king of social networking can only go down from here, Zuckerberg had one short response: “The thing I want to remind people of is we’re way closer to the beginning than the end.”

Over the summer, Facebook has spent a great deal of its time updating the site to have a more real-time feel, similar to Twitter’s forte. Over the next few months, likewise, we should expect to see even more substantial changes to the site that will bring it closer to its rival’s real-time search engine.

These new hires will likely be the team to maintain those vast changes.