One of the tech world’s most eagerly anticipated public offerings could take place next week, with Facebook potentially raising about $10B from shares that would value the company at as much as $100B, The Wall Street Journal reports. If the numbers are correct, then the Facebook IPO would be the largest-ever tech offering — well ahead of the $5.9B sale in 2000 for shares in semiconductor company Infineon Technologies. But first Facebook has to decide which Wall Street bank will lead its campaign, which the paper says could be worth “tens of millions of dollars in fees as well as bragging rights.” Morgan Stanley appears to be on top. But Goldman Sachs is still in the running despite its snafu last year when a $1.5B private offering it led for Facebook ended up being restricted to overseas investors. The banker made that decision after the SEC began to investigate whether Goldman had run afoul of the law that bars “general solicitation and advertising” for a private offering.


Anyone remember Myspace? The only thing that makes Facebook valuable is its popularity, and popularity does not last forever. The moment people start to move on to something else, Facebook is in real trouble.
Tom Anderson cashed out of MySpace and let Newscorp sit on it, thinking it would turn into some kind of Internet cash cow. It stopped being innovative or even adaptive. Absolutely the same thing could happen when a board starts picking apart every move Zuckerberg makes, but Facebook is far more integrated into more people’s lives than MySpace ever came close to being. You don’t hear people talking about the end of Google or Amazon.
And this will start to happen soon, if it isn’t already. People are tiring of FB’s restrictions and tinkering, and increasingly concerned with their handling of privacy issues.
This IPO seems like Old White Guys jumping on the bandwagon of something that’s already falling out of favor with the people who are at the forefront of technology use. And as FB is now used so heavily by the mainstream to push its wares, it’s certainly no longer cool.
Myspace is a great example to use. FB undoubtedly has much greater penetration than that, but will still end up going the same way sooner or later.
Right. Here’s something interesting. I Googled myself the other day and saw my name in the tags on a questionable Russian torrent site. I don’t do torrent and am paranoid about online security so I was surprised to see my name on a site I’ve never used. I saw a bunch of other names that I recognized and realized that they were people I was connected to on Facebook. With a bit more investigation, I realized that all the other names on this list were friends of friends on Facebook. The site didn’t just have my friends list, it had lists of all my friends’ friends. Looking round the site I saw this wasn’t the only list – there were endless lists of names which I’m guessing were built from Facebook. Somehow this site has accessed Facebook information and has the details of people’s friends networks. It was at that point that I realized it was time to close my Facebook account. Too much personal information – photos, messages, videos, events – in the hands of strangers and potentially available to criminals.
Wow. Who’s the idiot at Facebook who thinks that it’s a good idea to issue an IPO the same week that it unleashes the atrocious Timeline on a customer base that hasn’t been asking for it?
My problem is Facebook is Aolizing the Internet. We are going backwards in time when companies used to advertise aol keywords.
What facebook is doing is not good for the Internet. Using the best sites for various tools creates a better environment. Having one site control so much access to so many things is bad news.
Having been on and involved financially with the Internet since it first had ANY public presence I don’t like facebooks impact. Twitter is a great Internet tool. Facebook is a subpar replacement for the Internet, much like aol was for online services which then expanded into the Internet
I don’t have a problem with Facebook being a hub for people connecting but ultimately it us trying to be much more than that.