This is amusing. California politicians are already fighting over the estimated $500M in revenues the Facebook IPO will bring into the state.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/californ....

Quote:

Moments after Facebook filed its IPO on Wednesday, California legislative Republicans used it to take a swipe at Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed tax initiative.

It's an indication of how the public offering will dominate not only the business blogs, but discussions among budget wonks in the state Capitol in coming weeks.

The leaders of the small GOP caucuses in both houses of the Legislature released a joint statement urging Brown to use the expected windfall of state tax revenue from the IPO -- very, very rough estimates are in the $500-million ballpark -- to "protect our public schools from the Governor's trigger cuts and pay down the state's debt service."

Brown, a Democrat, has proposed cutting more than $4 billion from public schools if voters in November reject his proposed temporary tax hike to close California's persistent budget deficit. Republicans oppose the tax hike and would rather see Facebook revenues go toward keeping schools solvent this year.

Starving dogs will fight over the smallest bone.

Seems like a bait-n-switch play to sucker in some bagholders and allow some elites to monetize and cash out.

facebook is now dead....i cant believe that anyone wants to pay this kind of money for something that is so useless...on principle, everyone should revive their dead accounts for the sole purpose of spreading information on shorting FB

One step ahead of you Schwantz...

Facebook has outstripped Google in traffic. I don't get it but, more people think the Internet is Facebook than anything else. It's like AOL all over again * 100.

Wouldn't buy this, but that's the reasoning.

Should i share this on Facebook Karl?

When I heard the hype from Goldman a year or so ago it was worth $50 billion, I thought someone had lost their mind. I have seen too many fads myself over the years come and go on the net to believe that was nothing more than a ripoff scam. Getting that much money out of something with a return before it falls off the face of the Earth is a longshot.

priceless!

Leech**** republicans take a swipe at leech**** democrats so they take a fair share from leech**** bankers leeching the zucker leech who leeches the fb leeches in order to protect the leech teachers who teach the children.

Won't someone think of the children???

The timing is too funny. My brother called me today to ask if I was going to buy it. He know's I hate the social network B.S.and I've sighted many of the things the ticker pointed out as a reason to stay away. Investing in fantasy. It has all the makings of another Groupon. Good Luck to all who buy it..

NO...I don't want to be your friend! I told him.

I have a brother in law who gets special "access" into every IPO. He's flipped IPOs for 15 years with about 5 different brokers. He's salivating at this one.

I wonder if I will still have an account after doing that post.

5755, I bet it goes off pretty well. It will be a Roman Candle. They will turn the machines on and pump and dump. Gotta throw a little chum in the water you know.

Some local newspapers ( Gannett companies ) force you to use facebook for commenting.

"We're using Facebook Comments on articles to create a more civil environment for conversation. To find out more, please visit the FAQ."

The sport articles' commenting went down about 85%! Screw um!

I joined FB before my 20th college reunion... everyone was on it and excited to reconnect before the reunion. I used to also use it to post pictures for the grandparents to see. Not anymore. My wife will not touch it anymore.

And do you know how difficult it is to remove your profile?

Karl,

This is a great call and warning. If Google does not kill Facebook, Apple will.

Apple is sitting on a cash hoard that is unpresidented. They will suffer margin compression, so this is not a call to buy Apple, but Siri is a game changer and when Apple location services come out, watch Google and Facebook quiver.

Then when Apple buys a data carrier, they will kill many. Again, not a reason to buy Apple as Google will continue to fight and margins will continue to shrink.

In competitive capatalism, things change and the changes to come require relatively little R&D in the facebook space. The facebook model is just too easy to copy and just because Google failed with Google+ is no reason to think that Google or someone else will succeed.

There are only so many ad dollars to go around, and advertizers will shift to the platforms or media that gives the best returns. It is a very "fluid" market.

As a Facebook user, I am aware that I am the commodity being sold. I think that enough users have figured this out to have a say in what Facebook can do to monetize their presence. Frankly, the Timeline feature has not been implemented on this user's profile and many have chosen not to do it because they don't want their whole Facebook life placed before them. I think that Facebook will have to modify the ad system to be more noticeable (a campaign I recently ran had 48 clicks for 200,000+ impressions!), but I am personally concerned about social media overexposure and I have begun to pull back. Notwithstanding that Facebook may be part of Skynet, I think that users want their privacy respected and Facebook has been less sensitive to that than in the past. This will undo them.

Facebook, Myspace (hardly checked anymore), LinkedIn, and Twitter are enough for me. I prefer real, live humans whenever possible.

I spend too much time on Ticker Forum to fool much with Facebook. If not for the constant stream of emails, I would rarely go there. But, it is nice to post some crap about bankers and government nonsense, just in case the rest of the world is too busy watching TV to see the real news.

I've never had a face crook account, and never will. Never did myplace either. Don't do twister as well. I spend most of my time reading posts here, at Zero Hedge, Mish, and The Automatic Earth. I am not a very social person anyhow, prefer to be alone as much as possible, reading or listening to good old music.

As usual, Karl hit this one out of the park. Stay FAR away from this IPO. Its dead in the water.

Most comments here are from people who don't like Facebook, and seem to base their investment decision on that.

I don't smoke, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't buy shares in a tobacco firm.

However, even though I use Facebook every day, I still don't see how this is one to buy. The dotcom bubble alarm bells are ringing at top volume! Here is a company whose market position is already mature, whose only product is advertising, and whose customer base has a big chunk teenagers, whose habits can change at the drop of a hat.

I'm off to go on Facebook now...

If a company is generating such revenues and making such profits, why go public in the first place?

Why raise capital with an IPO, give away part of the business and generate huge fees for Wall Street when they could easily finance from their own earnings?

They want bagholders for management to dump to at inflated valuations.


We saw this story ad nauseum during the dot con boom.

FB is a timesink that I don't have time for.

And it is going to be used, if not already, by big brother to 'predict' crime.

See here:

Quote:

http://news.techworld.com/applications/3....

FBI developing social networking spy app
Application would crawl Twitter and Facebook
By Antony Savvas | Computerworld UK
27 January 2012

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is planning to develop an application that can track the public's postings to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, in order to aid how it predicts and reacts to criminal behaviour, including public disorder and terrorism.

An FBI request for information document has been published, asking potential contractors to contact the bureau by February 10. The FBI wants respondents to the document to outline how they would build such a system and how much it would potentially cost.

The bureau said the system it wants must be able to automatically search "publicly available" material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords of interest. FBI agents would be alerted if the searches come up with evidence of "breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats".

Agents would have the ability to display any information on a map, and they could then add other layers of information, including past incidents and locations of important buildings like embassies and military installations.

The document notes that agents need to "locate bad actors and analyse their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions".

NO thanks. The East German Stasi would have loved it. Think of all the man-hours they would saved versus actually manually spying on people. Instead FB members voluntarily type it all in, including what they like and all their friends.

No thank you.

Pintrest is the hot new thing, and it actually drives traffic to web retailers. I'm not sure how they are going to monetize but I would rather take a chance with something on the rise than ridiculously overpriced Facebook.

I deleted my FB account a few weeks ago. When I started seeing some of my "friends" with 800-900-1100 "friends" I just have to laugh. I guess the definition of a friend is different then what I remember. The same pathetic people were on there day after day - "going to the store, man coffee is expensive" "had a flat tire today, but my spare was flat too, lol" Actually I did not lol because I don't give a f***! DELETE.

You're lucky that you were able to delete your account. Some accounts are set up anonymously, one of which I've tried to delete on several occassions and cannot delete. Emails to FB and FB legal are not returned. The number of accounts set up like this may be small but FB does seems unconcerned about the potentialy great liability raised by potentially defamatory accounts.

mine was easy to delete - in fact I had the choice to delete or deactivate (come back later if you want and they will save everything). Of course in the delete scenario, it did say for 14 days you will be able to change your mind, after that no. So I will try and logon in a few weeks to make sure its gone.