“Personally I’d rather be underestimated, because it gives us good latitude to go out and take some big bets,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday at San Francisco’s TechCrunch Disrupt. “Because it allows us to do things that excite and amaze people.”

In his first public appearance since Facebook’s May IPO, Zuckerberg took questions from Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington that spanned a wealth of topics the newly-public company has struggled with.

“It’s obviously disappointing,” he said of the stock nosedive, noting that it actually poses the biggest challenge for recruiting, since he’s learned that sometimes good employees also like to make a lot of money, even if it’s not why he started the company.

“From the beginning of building Facebook, one of the core things I’ve learned is that you need to build a great team. And to build a great time, you need the best people,” he said. “We need a business model that incentivizes them to want to work with us.”

But Zuckerberg said the company is “mission-driven” and ready for the challenges the tech market throws at it:

“Facebook has not been an uncontroversial company in the past,” he said. “It’s not the first up and down we’ve ever had.”

Along with every other entrepreneur at Disrupt, Zuckerberg wanted to talk about mobile: What mobile is doing for Facebook, where the company needs to be on mobile, and how it’s changing who uses the service. He noted that since the company recently updated its notoriously terrible iOS app to make it faster and more user-friendly, they’ve seen “double the amount” of daily consumption in the newsfeed.

“The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 over iOS, because it just wasn’t there,” Zuckerberg said, although he said he still likes HTML5 for certain cases, and that their mobile web version still sees more traffic than iOS. “Good enough is not good enough.”

And for the founder himself, does he still code for the site?

“I code for fun on the side,” he said. When asked if his code ever breaks, he laughed and responded that “Everything I do breaks. But we fix it quickly.”

Zuckerberg strongly denied that Facebook is building a phone, and said that while the press likes to ponder a Facebook phone because “it’s such a juicy thing,” he said “it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us.”

So what does Facebook look like down the line?

“I just want to build big stuff,” he said. “The legacy of this company should be that we’ve connected everyone in the world, and everyone can share all the stuff they want. And that’s a lot.”

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The overall market appears to have shrugged off the social network’s misfortunes as both the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq have posted modest gains.

Facebook’s latest swoon does, however, appear to be pulling down its ill-starred step-brother, Zynga. The social game maker has fared even worse than Facebook, falling nearly 15 percent today alone.

FB data by YCharts

Facebook’s underwhelming performance since going public have set off recriminations and lawsuits between the company’s bankers and investors who accuse Facebook of failing to disclose that its growth prospects were slowing.

Facebook’s flop has set off hand-wringing about the prospect of a new tech bubble or a gloomy market for future IPO’s.

As ReadWriteWeb reports, however, not everyone can come bolting out of the gate. Its three year post-IPO chart, which shows a slumping Apple and a soaring Yahoo, underscores how share price may not be the best metric of determining a company’s long term value.

Facebook closed down nearly 10 percent at $28.84 while the overall market finished up around one percent.

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Now, Reuters reports that shareholders have filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court. The suit claims that Facebook and the banks wrongfully concealed weak growth forecasts, leading to shareholders over-paying for the stock when it debuted last Friday.

The Wall Street Journal described how Facebook’s Chief Financial Officer, David Ebersman, decided to increase the number of shares offered in the IPO by 25 percent. At the same time, Ebersman also chose to increase the opening price of the shares to $38.

As a result, the market was flooded with too many shares and the IPO quickly fizzled. Facebook shares have dipped on three consecutive days, hitting a low of $31 yesterday. The shares are up so far this morning.

More to come.

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Apparently, a captain of industry like Google’s executive chairman, never lets the chance to sell his company or tweak his rival go untaken. So even though he never uttered the “F word,” everyone got the message.

One example (paraphrased since I was behind the wheel): “Don’t hit the ‘like’ button. Talk to the people you like and love. Look them in the eye.”

Another: “Life is not about your friend count, it’s about the friends you can count on.”

"Life is not about your friend count, it's about the friends you can count on" Eric Schmidt Boston University Commencement 2012 #ericschmidt—
Scott Cohen (@Dimestore) May 20, 2012

Schmidt also told the new graduates to be sure to turn off their computers for at least an hour a day — a line that got the biggest roar out of the crowd.

Eric Schmidt at BU: take one hour a day and turn off all devices. Really connect.—
janefountain (@janeefountain) May 20, 2012

For the last few years, Google and Facebook have been locked in heated competition for the best talent in Silicon Valley and beyond. The noise around Facebook’s IPO contributed to the impression that Google, which went public in a then-record breaking 2004 IPO, is a has-been.

Apparently Eric Schmidt is the #BU commencement speaker. Can I put "don't be evil" on my graduation cap? #Google—
Alex Wolinetz (@alexwolinetz) May 03, 2012

That perception hurts. No wonder Schmidt got his digs in.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Guillaume Paumier

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The company has made no secret of its ambition to make sure every person on the planet is connected to its service. What might seem like hubris, however, is actually necessity: with Wall Street now breathing down its neck, overseas growth is important — investors want to see that however big it has become, Facebook still has headroom left. (Check out our chart of five countries outside the U.S. that could provide Facebook with a lot more users.)

So how will it manage?

First, use its headstart

To understand Facebook’s approach to international growth, it’s worth looking back at the way the company became so global quickly.

From very early on, Facebook had a strong foreign user base. In fact, unlike most companies, it was not really the company’s home success that drove its foreign expansion — it was foreign expansion that fueled its meteoric rise and underpinned its blockbuster flotation.

As early as 2007, the vast international potential was becoming very clear, when London became the single most popular city on Facebook. But then came perhaps its smartest move of all: instead of spending months deciding which markets to target, building local sales teams and internationalizing its product accordingly, Facebook designed a tool that let users translate the service into their own language — effectively crowdsourcing what is usually a slow, labor-intensive job.

And it proved a stunning success: in less than 24 hours, for example, 90 percent of the site had been translated into French. Former Facebooker Andy Johns has called it “the greatest lever” the company had for growth:

It made Facebook a platform capable of supporting everyone on the planet… Growth was not about hiring 10 people per country and putting them in the 20 most important countries and expecting it to grow. Growth was about [engineering] systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.

It was an inspired, engineering-led approach that allowed Facebook to rapidly scale out into dozens of new territories without ever targeting or investing in them specifically. Take Turkey, a fast-growing internet market with its own language. Without any member of the team ever targeting the country as a business prospect, Facebook became the country’s number 1 social site — and now boasts 92 percent market penetration.

This has all given the company huge reach at relatively little cost, and brought in a ton of revenue too: this year is likely to be the first in which Facebook will make more money outside the United States than in them (U.S. revenue fell from 62 percent in 2010 to 56 percent in 2011).

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of that number. But for some context, compare that with Google, where international revenue only outstripped U.S. revenue for the first time in 2008 — four years after it went public.

Continued international progress is massively important, not least because it’s where new users are coming from.

Pingdom, which found Facebook’s six-month U.S. user growth at just 0.86 percent compared with Brazil’s 54 percent, says: “It seems evident that Facebook needs an expansion plan that involves all corners of the world, but that focuses on certain regions, like Africa and Asia.”

Facebook acknowledges the problem, and the opportunity. Alongside mobile and advertising, it has sold investors on hoped-for international growth. “There are more than two billion global internet users, according to an IDC report dated August 2011,” its S-1 read. “And we aim to connect all of them.”

Now it just has to deliver on that promise.

So where next?

The omens for continued expansion may be good. Thanks to its translation success, Facebook has already unseated eight dominant local-language competitors in the last two years, according to comScore – most recently, Orkut in Brazil and Poland’s Nasa Klasa.pl.

Recent data from Pingdom shows strong gains in other countries, leaving just a handful of nations where Facebook is not the top dog: China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Russia.

“Now there are only five markets where Facebook is not the #1 social networking site,” a comScore spokesperson told us. “What’s interesting here is that Vietnam, Japan and South Korea are amongst the top four fastest growing markets, with year-over-year growth rates of 80 to 270 percent.”

But these remaining countries are also the toughest nuts to crack. And the biggest prize of all, China, may need a sledge hammer — after all Facebook is blocked by the country’s Great Firewall.

If it can piggyback China’s explosive broadband and mobile internet adoption, Facebook’s own growth may surge even further. But this will be anything but a walk in the park.

Investors have been warned. Facebook’s s-1 filing cautioned:

“We do not know if we will be able to find an approach to managing content and information that will be acceptable to us and to the Chinese government.

“In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.”

China’s state authorities grant spartan online operating licenses to overseas players, especially powerhouses, leaving the market to indigenous networks, which themselves are allowed to operate only under a strict regime of monitoring and censorship by the government.

That is a controversial and technically difficult task for any social network. But, if it’s good enough for China’s own, it may be a move that Facebook, too, has to consider if it wants to break in.

But it’s not just China that could prove tricky. Google can attest to the difficulties of launching in unfriendly countries. Its $140 million acquisition of the Rambler portal’s Begun contextual ad agency was blocked in 2008 because of what Russian competition authorities said was insufficient paperwork.

And, while trying to make inroads to its five target nations, Facebook must also be on its guard to make sure it protects its leading position in other markets, many of which are small enough that launches or improvements from indigenous competitors could have profound impact.

The revenue question

Even if the company can push growth numbers by securing a dominant position in every single one of the world’s countries, there is another big question: how to keep revenue going up internationally too.

This is a very important problem it faces: during its IPO roadshow, executives explained that while an American user with high disposable income was worth $9.51 in Facebook ad revenue last year, Europe was worth considerably less at $4.86. Asia, meanwhile, came in at $1.79 and the rest of the world made Facebook just $1.42 per user.

So while international growth may be large, the granular detail on income is less impressive. These are not figures that will please Facebook’s investors if they do not rise — and, as Thomas Crampton of Social@Ogilvy & Mather’s Asia-Pacific unit has pointed out, users in lower-income countries like India are going to be hard to monetize more effectively.

Getting average revenues up could mean international users seeing more ads; working more partnerships outside the U.S.; using its scale to push revenue strategies that go way beyond advertising (such as a Facebook credit card). It could even require the company ditching a reliance on engineering solutions in favor of pushing harder at the drearier but tried-and-trusted approach of building large local sales teams.

Whatever the case, you can be sure Facebook will be trying everything it can to increase its international audience — and make it as valuable as possible.

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After growth slowed just in time for its IPO, Facebook must look overseas for a jump-start.

Target countries are easy to see. ”Now there are only five markets where Facebook is not the #1 social networking site,” a comScore spokesperson tells paidContent.

But cultural differences, government restrictions and incumbent local rivals will all make Facebook’s growth challenging. (Check out our broader take on Facebook’s international ambitions here.)

Here is our map for Mark Zuckerberg’s overseas adventure. Cool countries are those with already-high Facebook penetration, hotspots are thosse Facebook must crack to become a true global powerhouse…

1. China
”near 0% penetration”. Growth prospects: Poor — Zuckerberg can’t comply with online state censorship
#1	Tencent Qzone	Built on Tencent’s QQ IM network, Qzone lets users buy a 10-yuan-a-month “Canary Diamond” to decorate their zones with.
#2	Sina Weibo	Hit 300 million microblog users by delighting citizens with open info sharing. Now ready to introduce ads.
#3	RenRen	Billed itself as China’s “leading real-name” social net; now new regulations require all network customers use their real names.
The People’s Republic is the big prize. If it could piggyback China’s explosive broadband and mobile internet adoption, Facebook’s own growth would rocket. But that will be anything but easy. Currently blocked by China, the site claims ”near 0% penetration” there. It warned IPO filing readers: “We do not know if we will be able to find an approach to managing content and information that will be acceptable to us and to the Chinese government. In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.”That’s the reality of it. One problem for Facebook is China’s state authorities, which grant spartan online operating licenses to overseas players, especially powerhouses like Facebook. Another is the increasingly powerful indigenous players to which the market has been left. Social network growth has exploded, but most of the operators are native incumbent portals, with eye-popping user counts. Succeeding social networks, the rise of weibos (Twitter-esque microblog services) has gained mindshare for allowing quick dissemination of information in the country notorious for restricting information flow.But the Chinese market is also in flux. Local services complied with new regulations compelling them to remove apparently false and controversial information, and to force users to use their real names.Will Facebook controversially kowtow to measures Silicon Valley and Wall Street might find reprehensible? If so, it could be the easiest move it would make in China – the country has been the rocks on which many a western company has floundered. But consenting to Chinese restrictions on online free speech would be utterly at odds with Zuckerberg’s open ethos – so let’s continue to consider China off-limits.
2. Russia
21.2% of online population (comScore, March 2012). Growth prospects: Very good — Already gained good toe-hold.
#1	VK.com	Russia’s fourth-most-used website has around 120 million accounts, is popular (and controversial) for its integrated file-sharing – and bears striking resemblance to Facebook.
#2	Odnoklassniki	Russia’s Classmates site puts a Facebook shareholder in an awkward position – DST owns it.
#3	Facebook	Has grown fast since launching in Russia in early 2010.
Russians are the world’s most prolific social network users, according to comScore. Facebook has already grown fast there. The country puts the site in a strange position, since two competitors (Odnoklassniki and Mail.ru’s MyWorld) are backed by Facebook investor DST. Now that DST has exited through Facebook’s IPO, however, the stage is set for a clean fight. “The figures suggest that local social networks will not be able to hold onto their dominance much longer,” eMarketer said in February. “The real question may not be whether Facebook will overtake local social networks there, but when.” Market leader vKontakte’s popularity may decline if it complies with a court ruling that it breaches copyright by removing its file-sharing feature.
3. South Korea
27.2% of online population (comScore, March 2012). Growth prospects: Very good – Already hurting competition.
#1	Cyworld	Tried and failed to enter the U.S. and Europe but this isometric 3D chat world succeeds at selling virtual goods to users.
#2	Me2day	This local Korean microblog service, operated by the Naver portal, is popular with celebrities.
#3	Facebook	Its monthly users doubled to 12 million in 2011, Korea Herald reported.
In the country that has been enjoying high-speed fixed and mobile services for years, Cyworld has locked up mindshare since 1999. But Facebook is poised for big gains – last year, it robbed Cyworld of members, prompting the incumbent to invoke a corporate revamp to fight back, Korea Herald reported.
4. Japan
23.4% of online population (comScore, March 2012). Growth prospects: Moderate – Zuck must beat the Tweet.
#1	Twitter	Guess who? Japan’s top social network is Facebook’s Silicon Valley sparring partner, whose first non-English endeavour has paid dividends.
#2	Mixi	The site has gained a strong local mindshare by founding early, in 2000.
#3	Facebook	Japanese user base grew by 78 percent through 2011.
After Twitter overtook local network Mixi, Japan is a “Twitter nation”. There, successive global records have been broken for tweets-per-minute, despite Twitter being predominantly an English-language medium. So Facebook will have to fight its domestic competitor on foreign turf.
5. Vietnam
37.8% of online population (comScore, March 2012). Growth prospects: Uncertain – To block or not to block?
#1	ZingMe	A focus on games has given the native site the lead.
#2	Go.vn	This Facebook rival is some competitor – operated by state-owned Vietnam Media Corp.
#3	Facebook	Has apparently suffered from censorship after earlier growth.
Facebook has been blocked in Vietnam since 2009, but many citizens circumvent it with a few clicks, The Economist reports. The communist government’s on-off embrace of social networks comes against a backdrop requiring their compliance with censorship laws. Confusion reigns.

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After a delayed start, Facebook started trading at $42, about 10.5 percent above its offer price of $38. But over the course of the day, it gradually traded down to close at $38.23, barely squeaking in above its starting price. In after hours trading, the price remained around $38.27. According to analysts and industry reports, whenever the stock threatened to fall below the opening price, Facebook’s underwriters stepped in to prop it up.

“We are seeing the stock hit reality like a brick wall,” said GreenCrest Capital senior managing analyst Anupam Palit.  Facebook’s scale and engagement might have pushed its valuation to $100 billion, but, like every other public company it’s not immune to the larger economic trends.

Palit said he expected Facebook’s first day to be less dramatic than that of its public tech peers (like LinkedIn, Pandora and Groupon, which all saw a first-day pop of at least 30 percent), but added that today was “definitely more muted” than anticipated.

Still, he said that Facebook’s performance was generally positive considering that “the guys who have flown really high on their IPO have tumbled in subsequent weeks.”

Also, while first-day retail interest in other tech stocks had been essentially nonexistent, Palit said, retail buyers were much more interested in Facebook.

“It is a much more ‘tangible’ company because the average person uses it and knows what it is,” he said. “There are retail investors who want to say they took part in this because it is a big moment in market history.”

That played out today, he said, as retail buyers were willing to push the stock above $40, while institutional investors, who are more sensitive to valuation, wanted to keep the price lower. In the following weeks, Palit expects the price to continue to fall, eventually settling around $32.

On Friday, more than 577 million shares in Facebook changed hands, setting a new record for IPO trading volume.

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In a blog post, Lee and Ben write:

Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level.

We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.

The deal terms were not announced. Facebook plans to keep the service alive. A Facebook spokesperson said this is an acqusiton and not an acquhire.

“We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”

Facebook has gotten fairly aggressive in its acquisitions of mobile applications and acquired Instagram for close to a billion dollars. Karma is quite a stunning app and I have become quite a fan. In fact, I thought this could be the next Fab.com. When Karma launched we looked at the company and here is what we wrote:

What’s nice about the Karma app is that users can send gifts almost instantaneously, without having to enter their billing information before doing so. You also don’t need to have the address or contact info of the recipient — they enter that information when they choose to accept a gift.

It also allows users to send a personalized note to people they’re gifting, either by SMS, posted on their Facebook walls, or by email. Those receiving gifts can even choose between options or swap out something they’ve been given if they’re not thrilled with what was initially gifted to them.

One of the more interesting aspects about the Karma mobile experience isn’t just that it makes gifting by phone ultra-easy, but that it helps to highlight the news around friends and family that actually matters. There’s so much noise on Facebook that it’s difficult to tell now when a friend is having a birthday, or if someone got engaged or is having a baby. The Karma app, by contrast, uses semantic analysis to determine events that are worth gifting people for.

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13.05: Facebook closed the day flat at $38 a share. Smartly priced? And with it, we bring our live blog to a close. Thanks for staying and reading.

12.55: In case you were wondering: How did Mark Zuckerberg retain 26% of equity after so many rounds of financing?

12.51: Milo Yiannopoulos on the new Murdoch aka Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook is on course to be the new News Corp: a global corporation that subverts and corrupts democratic process in furtherance of its own ideological and financial objectives. The difference is that while Rupert Murdoch’s empire has been circumscribed by the limits of production and broadcast, Zuckerberg’s is already in your home, on your laptop, at your workstation and even in your back pocket. Facebook has achieved in a few short years what it took Murdoch decades to accomplish – but the implications of Zuckerberg’s power are far more disturbing.

12:21: Rob Hof at Forbes says that the lack of a first-day “pop” in Facebook’s share price may be a sign that bankers picked the right price, but it’s a PR failure:

IPOs aren’t just about raising money. They are a publicity event intended to cement a company’s arrival as a solid corporate citizen and, at least when it comes to technology companies, a growth stock. A first-day pop, even a relatively small one, often provides a signal that a company is indeed a hot commodity.

12:06: Data analysis company DataSift looked at more than 75,000 interactions on Twitter and the sentiment expressed about Facebook’s IPO and then correlated those with the actual trading:

11:57: A sign of the times, literally: a real-estate agent willing to accept stock in return for a building lot (via Jonathan Heileger of North Bridge Venture Partners):

11:42: One teenager — the daughter of Loop Insight editor-in-chief Jim Dalrymple — gives her perspective on the Facebook IPO:

My 19-year-old daughter @beardsdaughter: "Why are people investing in Facebook, it's already on the way out."

—
Jim Dalrymple (@jdalrymple) May 18, 2012

11:39: The Washington Post may not have invested in Facebook when it had the chance, but chairman Don Graham’s net worth has increased by about $40 million as a result of shares he was awarded when he joined the Facebook board.

11:28: David Hornik, a venture capital partner with August Capital, says that several visionary investors — including Yuri Milner — deserve some credit for seeing the value of Facebook early:

It is impossible to ignore the economic impact of the Facebook IPO. It will make many people very rich. And it secures what has been known for a long time — Facebook is the best Venture Capital investment in the history of the industry.

11:26: A Facebook update from chief technology officer Bret Taylor:

11:16: Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has some thoughts and questions about what happens to Facebook post-IPO, including whether investors will start to care about the CEO’s iron grip over the votes and the board:

Not all corporate structures are alike and as Matt Yglesias explained a while back, Facebook’s power is concentrated in one person: Mark Zuckerberg. Is this going to become an issue for investors or are they all too happy having Zuck running the show?

11:08: You think he’s young now? Here’s a photo that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (now owner of The New Republic) posted to his Facebook wall of himself with Mark Zuckerberg and fellow co-founder Dustin Moskovitz:

11:03: According to the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, in the first 10 minutes of being public, Facebook had already traded 25 percent of the highest volume of any initial offering in history.

10:56: Just to show that some people live outside the Facebook IPO bubble, Betabeat talked with some normal human beings in Times Square outside the Nasdaq trading screen:

We passed by two blonde twenty-somethings, tourists from Germany, who were wondering what exactly was going on. “It’s a business story,” clarified our news editor. “Oh, okay,” they said, nodding, still looking quite confused.

10:51: You knew it was coming, sooner or later — a video animation from Taiwan’s NMA about Facebook’s historic moment:

10:45: How much does India love Facebook’s IPO? Judging from this photo, a whole bunch (via Prasanto Roy)

10.40: Will the IPO Change the Way Users See Facebook?

It has a unique relationship with the users who entrust the Facebook to manage enormous amounts of personal data, knowing that mistakes can have profound social consequences. That unique relationship puts Facebook under more scrutiny by it’s users than, say, a company like Walmart receives from its customers. So, threats to it’s mystique of being something more than just-another-company are particularly problematic. As a public entity, Facebook with be subject to pressure by shareholders to make changes for the sake of producing revenue that are contrary to the interests of users.

10.30: Dominic Basulto writes Facebook Unlike and Internet Schadenfreude

At a time when Facebook promises to transform hundreds of investors and employers into paper millionaires, the site’s 900 million users are wondering: What about me? The site, which rocketed to fame and fortune by selling advertising based on the personal data of its users, will leave almost all of them empty-handed. As a result, we have people gloating over the site’s disenchanted advertisers.

At some level, we’re all disenchanted that the world’s most successful Internet company is actually just a massive advertising play. Facebook sells ads based on our web behaviors and personal profiles.

If nothing else, this schadenfreude will only deepen as we find out how other Web companies are getting rich by trafficking in our personal data. As we transition to a new mobile, post-PC era, this trend towards personal data consumption by the Internet’s most successful companies will, most likely, only deepen.

10.20: Why do we care about the Facebook IPO? Rohit Bhargava explains

Only a fraction of us watching the coverage today will actually be in the market to try and purchase some shares, yet we will watch. Is it merely the historic size of the IPO? No, I think the real reason is something more fundamental.

We all have a personal connection to Facebook. We all use it, and not just as a “user” of Coke drinks a can once in a while. We rely on it to manage many of our personal relationships and share our memories. Facebook is more than a social network, it is a utility – like water.

10.03: Look who is driving toy cars. Hint – not Mark!

Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss with Divya Narendra (via Instagram posted on May 2, 2012.)

09.57: Jim Cramer writing for TheStreet:

We want things to be compliant with Facebook(FB). That means we need to see oil stabilize. We need to see Europe stabilize, which it can, given that every short is worried about something good happening this weekend. We need to see gold rise, which is what happens each time the Germans give in to some growth initiative that could be considered inflationary. We also need to see earnings be smooth.

So we have a decent backdrop, for certain. But we also need to see the frenzy die down — and that, well, that’s not going to happen. So if we balance the über-exuberance of Facebook with the über-depression of an oversold stock market, maybe — just maybe — we’ll get a decent day. Of course, that sure hasn’t been the case on many Europe-dominated Fridays.

09.51: David Sze of Greylock Partners was at Facebook HQ and spoke to Forbes.

“People were milling around in the middle of the square in anticipation,” Sze said. “(COO) Sheryl (Sandberg) spoke a little bit. The (person from) Nasdaq spoke a little bit. Mark spoke. Then they opened the bell. Everyone cheered and celebrated for about 10 minutes. Then everyone went back to their offices and started working again. It’s a great milestone for the company. Wonderful congratulations to all of them. But one of the great things about Facebook is you don’t get to where they’ve gotten and get where they’re going to go without being really focused.”

09.48: Chris Cox, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s confidantes is having a great day. Photo by investor David Sze.

09.26: Facebook users are double dippers, says comScore.

40+% of Facebook users use another Social Network or sharing service (up from 20% last year.) Twitter (23.8% of FB users), LinkedIn (20.3%), Google+ (16.6%), Tumblr (13.9%), Pinterest (12.1%)

08.59: Facebook IPO is all that everybody seems to be talking about on Twitter.

DataSift recorded 190003 interactions generated by 85689 unique authors, over a period of 5 days.

8:55: A thought from Venrock venture partner David Pakman:

What an incredible accomplishment - the creation of a $100B company. A celebration of genius entrepreneurship. Congrats to everyone at $FB.

—
David Pakman (@pakman) May 18, 2012

8:53: As risky as it might be to sell such a high-volume stock short (i.e., bet on it going down), some hedge funds say they are preparing to do exactly that:

“This is about as bubbly as you can get,” he said. “My mother asked me if she could get Facebook shares and she has never been interested in IPOs before. A cab driver asked me about the IPO too. That’s when you want to short it.”

8:45: Apparently Facebook’s IPO isn’t doing any favors for one of its biggest partners, game developer Zynga — Reuters says the stock has been halted after dropping 13 percent:

RT @rossneumann: ZYNGA trades halted as stock drops 13% bit.ly/KyZKSK

—
Matthew Keys (@ProducerMatthew) May 18, 2012

8:40: A thought from early Facebook staffer and Benchmark Capital partner Matt Cohler:

So very, very proud of my friends and colleagues at Facebook. Today is just another step in the journey, but an important and exciting one!

—
Matt Cohler (@mattcohler) May 18, 2012

8:35: According to Reuters, Facebook traded a mind-boggling 82 million shares in the first 30 seconds on Nasdaq:

Facebook, Inc. trades 82 million shares in first 30 seconds. Facebook IPO live blog - bit.ly/JXw9RQ $FB

—
Reuters Top News (@Reuters) May 18, 2012

We’re also tracking the trading of Facebook in a separate post.

8:32: Finally, Facebook starts trading — up a respectable 13 percent in the opening to $42, and cheers at CNBC according to Eric Jackson:

8:29: While the Nasdaq tries to cope with a tsunami of demand for Facebook shares, there’s plenty of time for more witticisms, like this one from humorist Steve Murray:

What are the chances that facebook will open and then immediately suspend or crash like it does on my iphone?

—
Steve Murray (@NPsteve) May 18, 2012

8:22: Nasdaq officials have said they were forced to delay Facebook’s opening further for technical reasons, and Barron’s columnist Steve Sears says someone must have underestimated the demand:

The FB delay simply reflects the cold fact of bandwidth limitations for electronic trading. Someone at NDAQ mis-calcuated FB demand.

—
Steve Sears (@sm_sears) May 18, 2012

8:18: So where is Facebook? Nasdaq says it is experiencing a delay, likely due to enormous demand according to Bloomberg:

Nasdaq says it’s ‘experiencing delay’ in opening Facebook. Likely due to enormous retail demand. Live coverage: bloomberg.com/tv

—
Mathew Yurow (@myurow) May 18, 2012

8:15: A thought from Marketplace Wall Street reporter Heidi Moore:

CNBC: "I just want to make sure we don't whip ourselves into a frenzy on the short term value." That horse has left the barn.

—
Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 18, 2012

8:13: Some frustration on the part of financial commentators like the CBC’s Amanda Lang as Facebook is still delayed:

This is what happens when child dictators head public companies: start trading FB already!!

—
Amanda Lang (@AmandaLang_CBC) May 18, 2012

8:11: While we wait for the stock to actually start trading, a thought from Yieldbot founder Jonathan Mendez:

Nice day to recall that on 12/23/99 Yahoo passed the $100B valuation mark. $YHOO

—
Jonathan Mendez (@jonathanmendez) May 18, 2012

8:05: Why didn’t Facebook stock begin trading when the Nasdaq exchange first opened at 9 am Eastern? Because that’s just how the Nasdaq works, that’s why:

“It’s not a delay or a problem, just a matter of style,” said a source familiar with Nasdaq’s process. “We want to have an IPO stand alone at its own special time.”

8:04: AOL founder Steve Case thinks back to the day when his company went public at a much smaller valuation:

Celebrating Facebook IPO today while reflecting on AOL IPO 20 years ago. Valuation was $70 million. Most thought Internet was a fad. #wrong

—
Steve Case (@SteveCase) May 18, 2012

8:01: Reuters says Facebook trading has been delayed until 11:05 Eastern, so day-traders can stand down for another few minutes.

7:57: A wry observation from Twitter chairman and Square CEO Jack Dorsey:

Wow. Slow news day.

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) May 18, 2012

7:54: With Facebook stock set to begin official trading within minutes, here’s an official photo of the Nasdaq bell-ringing ceremony provided by Facebook:

7:51: In the list of those who have become extremely wealthy as a result of the Facebook IPO you will find the name of one Paul Hewson — otherwise known as U2 front-man Bono, who New Music Express says will officially become the richest musician in the world, eclipsing Paul McCartney:

The U2 singer owns 2.3 per cent of the shares in Facebook through his private equity firm, Elevation Partners, which they bought for $90 million (£57 million) in 2009

Also, CNBC notes that much of musician Kenny G.’s net worth comes from a seed investment he made in Starbucks (via Staci Kramer).

7:42: True to Facebook’s hacker culture, a programmer at the giant social network hacked the Nasdaq opening bell button (with the exchange’s permission) to automatically post a status update to Mark Zuckerberg’s page — using the engineer’s headphones:

7:36: A photo posted on Facebook by mobile product manager Erick Tseng, with the caption: “It’s official! Exciting day! Now some sleep, then back to work!”

7:31: Wade Roush at Xconomy asks the new Facebook millionaires and billionaires to spend some of their time and resources after the IPO on some really world-changing problems instead of just new Ferraris:

I’m not saying that ex-Facebookers should abandon their training in business or computer science and become climatologists, roboticists, entomologists, or oceanographers. But they can certainly take the lessons they’ve learned about building scalable systems and harnessing natural human behaviors and apply them to problems outside social networking.

7:28: According to CNBC, retail interest in the Facebook IPO — that is, interest expressed by non-professional traders — is the highest ever for an initial offering:

RT @CNBC: BREAKING: CNBC's Kelly: Retail demand for $FB highest ever for IPO; people close to deal expected retail component of 15%-25%. ...

—
Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) May 18, 2012

7:24: Meanwhile, New York Times writer Nick Bilton asks us to spare a thought for two of the people who probably feel the most left out of the Facebook hype:

In an alternate universe, the Winklevii twinsies are ringing a NASDAQ bell right now.

—
Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) May 18, 2012

7:22: Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, warns anyone thinking of buying Silicon Valley real estate about the spinoff effects of the world’s largest technology IPO:

Reminder: today marks the last day you can buy a house in the Valley without having to rob a bank or start Instagram.

—
Aaron Levie (@levie) May 17, 2012

7:17: The Boston Globe points out that, in contrast to how both Google and Netscape were treated by the universities where they were created, Harvard made the smart move by not asserting any rights over Facebook despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg developed it while he was a student there:

Harvard’s minor role in Facebook’s history has attracted a different reaction: a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster, a reinvigorated reputation as a dream school for entrepreneurial teens, and warm feelings among millionaire alumni who may become large donors. By contrast, few know that modern web browsing was born at the University of Illinois, and Netscape’s embittered founders vowed never to give another dime to their alma mater-turned-adversary.

Hat tip to Techdirt for spotting that one.

7:14: A great photo from New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter, posted on Instagram just after the ringing of the trading bell:

7:11: Comedian Andy Borowitz has been firing off one-liners about the Facebook IPO since Thursday, including this gem:

As for Facebook, people seem to be saying that $100B is a small price to pay to avoid interacting with actual people.

—
Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport) May 17, 2012

7:09: Although Mark Zuckerberg has already run the ceremonial opening bell at the Nasdaq exchange, actual trading of the stock won’t begin until 11:00 a.m. Eastern — so you can stop holding your finger over the “buy” button on your Bloomberg terminal now.

7:01: Apparently not everyone is aware of what a momentous day this is, according to this tweet from Eric Jackson:

Barista at Starbucks next to Nasdaq just asked me "what the heck is going on today?!"

—
Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) May 18, 2012

6:57: There have been lots of great Twitter responses to the Facebook IPO, but one of the best was from blogger Ed Hunsinger, or @edrabbit:

Why is Facebook going public? They couldn't figure out the privacy settings either.

—
Ed Hunsinger (@edrabbit) May 17, 2012

6:52: Those newly-minted Facebook millionaires had better restrain themselves, according to a New York Times story on the nouveau tech rich:

“The message here is, ‘Keep shipping product,’ ” said a Facebook executive who requested anonymity while discussing internal matters. “If someone buys a fancy car and posts a picture of it, they get ridiculed and berated.”

6:51: Remember when everyone was saying they were quitting Facebook? MG Siegler does:

I swore I read that everyone was quitting Facebook in 2008. Then 2009. Then 2010. Then 2011. What happened?

—
MG Siegler (@parislemon) May 18, 2012

6:46: A historic moment is recorded — where else — as a Facebook status update:

6:43: Looks like someone in the TV caption-writing game needs a spelling lesson:

6:40: Ryan Holiday at Forbes says there’s one reason why the media loves writing about companies in their pre-IPO period — because they can say whatever they want and the company can’t comment:

It’s not just about capturing a popular SEO-term. The real reason is much more insidious. It all comes down to exploiting a single fact: the reporter has complete freedom to write the “facts” however they want while the company is gagged by the SEC’s quiet period regulations.

6:38: Here’s a shot of Mark Zuckerberg ringing the opening bell:

6:35: It seems as though everyone is excited about the potential of buying Facebook stock, based on this tweet:

BUY BUY BUY!

—
Jesus Christ (@jesus) May 18, 2012

06:23: Watch Zuck ring the bell live here in a few minutes.

06.10: The Atlantic says Facebook is a weapon of mass distraction.

“Facebook’s greatest asset is its immense capacity to distract us. The best social media companies manage to get 10% of their users to come back each day, according Foursquare/Tumblr/Twitter/Zynga investor Fred Wilson. Ten percent isn’t cool, Facebook contends. You know what’s cool? Fifty percent.”

06.01: Eduardo Saverin, the “Brazilian” on the eve of the IPO on his Facebook page:

On the eve of the Facebook public float, 8 plus year in the making, I as co-founder wanted to look back and cherish Facebook’s early beginning. Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg [sic] on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.

05.56: The New York Times: General Mark Zuckerberg

“We heard from people close to Mr. Zuckerberg that part of his leadership skills can be attributed to his penchant for playing games that involve conquering virtual worlds. A favorite video game of his as a boy was ‘Civilization’, the object of which is to ‘build an empire to stand the test of time,’ a friend of Mr. Zuckerberg’s told The New York Times. The person added that ‘Civilization’ was the ‘training wheels for starting Facebook.’”

I clearly should stop wasting my time on Tetris -Om

00.01: Want to predict the closing price of Facebook IPO on first day of trading? Play this game -facebookipodatclosingprice.com! I am betting it ends up in the $60-$75 range. – Om

One of the cool things about that closing-price prediction site is that creator James Proud set it up after angel investor Chris Sacca asked for just such a thing in this tweet. - Mathew

00.00: CNBC: India Set to Overtake US as Facebook’s Largest Market

“India is set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest Facebook market by number of users as early as 2015, according to social media analysts, driven by growing internet penetration and high rates of growth in mobile connections. As Facebook’s third largest market, India is home to over 45 million users, behind Brazil and the United States with 47 and 157 million users, respectively, according to the latest data from Facebook’s advertising platform.”

This is not necessarily a good thing. It is hard to monetize the overseas traffic and many Internet companies have learned this the hard way. – Om