[PCWorld]

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[jwojewidka]

Common sense should prevail!

Of course, this is a ridiculous frankly stupid deal. Will FB *ever* get $1B of value out of this? Of course not! If they are lucky, maybe a small fraction.

There are (should be!) a lot of questions about why and how this could have happened. A lot had to do with personal relationships, etc. And, we will probably never know exactly why this could have even been on the table to begin with. I'm not sure I'd like to know.

But, it's clear it makes FB and Zuckerberg look really naive (and dangerous for future shareholders), and that this 18-month old company with no revenues was the world's biggest recipient of pork-barrel-aid.

This follows on the heals of deals like the Groupon IPO which has already proved to be a major Wall Street/Silicon Valley insider scam. These kinds of deals *only* benefit the deal originators, and never the public shareholders. Groupon will implode. This deal will never make sense. Only the architects will benefit.

This BS has to stop. For all the millions of hard-working, smart, dedicated - but not connected - people out there busting their assess to start and grow valuable, legitimate businesses, this kind of rubbish just makes it harder.

The media can't dance around this, either. Call it what it is! Don't speculate or ruminate on it's validity when it clearly doesn't make sense, and stop perpetuating this myth that these out-of-the-park deals are the way things are, and what we should all be aspiring to or just hang it up.

Bubble potential, indeed.

[jwojewidka]

One more thing about Any Baio's comments: the cost per eyeball-set could be argued to kind of be in line, but what are each of those eyeballs actually worth in context? To run a business successfully, you have to give value and extract payment. Sharing photos like this - and has anyone every heard of Flickr? - can't possibly economically justify this purchase. Ever.

[karthiq]

in my opinion,IG must have played hard to get so FB ended up paying that much.

[AJohnTurner]

Please remember the first dot-com bubble in the 1990s, back when people spoke glibly about lining up eight figures in venture capital, burning it off a dazzling eighteen-month flash of publicity (to establish site traffic and brand identity) and then divvying up an eleventh-hour, nine-figure buyout as their exit strategy.

They got the idea from land developers; stake a "choice property", provide "vital improvements" without immediate profit, then unload your property on a "builder" for ten times what you put into it. You're in and out in less than two years if you do it right, and ready to roll your cash over into a bigger better deal.

Oh wait -- there was a real-estate bubble too, wasn't there?

[Mikeln7r]

Its going to take an implosion for the sleepy investors to wake up to whats happening with the funds they have invested with. The second one of these overrated goliath's like twitter implodes, investors are going to knee-jerk and pull all the money back out like the lemmings they were when they put it in. This is *not* good for silicone valley where the bottom line hasn't really mattered for a number of years now. Whats sad is even a taco shop owner can tell you there is no escaping that bottom line. Eventually you're going to run out of other people's money. It should be painfully obvious as to why top talent keeps seeming to flee the bay area. Nobody wants to get caught in the epicenter fighting for the few remaining jobs when the inevitable happens.

[JakobThusgaard]

Disagree slightly on the point related to Google and the Moto Mobile take over:

That was mainly a defensive move, not triggered by a common belief at Google that innovation is dead as value-driver. Google had to do something in the wake of Apple+MSFT going after them in court. They had to create leverage.

In court, I think you can speak about innovation all day long, without it having much impact at all on any actual cases. Those cases, though, could shut your business down, so you MUST act!

[xyberviri]

Can’t you all stfu while we try to figure out what bubble to create for face book to buy. Life is about buying low then over valuing it to sell it high and getting out of there before the suckers realized they been had. Which means little guys like me aren't going to be able to come up with a get rich quick scheme to pull over people like zuckerberg, if you all dont pipe down about it.

[GopalDas]

Unfortunately, there are still tons of scams out there…There is a new iPhone app recently released, called Scam Detector, which exposes like 500 scams. It is worth checking it out, if you have an iPhone. The app is also online - they have a free web version, if interested. Google it, it's kinda cool, actually.