Facebook, Social Networking | featured news

The company's employees and investors are spending in advance of their big payday, fueling an economy that's already humming thanks to the Bay Area's thriving technology sector. The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy.

Mark Zuckerberg was not kidding about Facebook’s hacker culture. The night before the chartbusting initial public stock offering, engineers won’t be counting their Facebook dollars. They’ll be doing what they have always done: Hack. Facebook will pull an all-night hackathon that will end when Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park campus.

Investors who want Facebook Inc shares when the No. 1 online social network goes public later this week may have lost the opportunity. TD Ameritrade and Fidelity's brokerage arm both stopped accepting orders of Facebook shares as of Tuesday evening, according to representatives for each of the companies.

General Motors Co said on Tuesday it will stop advertising on Facebook, even as the social networking website prepares to go public, with a source familiar with the matter saying the automaker had decided Facebook's ads had little impact on consumers.

It?s entirely possible to create a list of reasons why you and I should be trying to buy stock in the Facebook IPO. There might well be a price pop given the interest in the issue. The company looks as if it might well become part of the basic infrastructure of the modern world.

Facebook's reach is wide but not deep. Few users surveyed in an Associated Press-CNBC poll say they click on the site's ads or buy the virtual goods that make money for it.

Facebook took another step toward its goal of being a platform for developers Wednesday, by announcing that it will launch its own App Center, a single location for the platform’s many applications. The company also announced that it will begin supporting paid apps, a program that it is offering to developers in a beta test. (Right now, developers can have in-app payments on the network, but all applications have been free to access.)

Facebook has raked in billions and will make a splash when its stock hits the open market next week. So, what are folks on Wall Street concerned about? Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie, apparently.

Facebook Inc's initial public offering pitch played to some bad reviews in New York, so for its Boston audience on Tuesday, the 30-minute video was scrapped and the company took more questions from analysts and potential investors.

How to put all this into a Facebook valuation? To justify the big numbers being tossed around – $100bn and up – several things must happen in the next five to seven years. The business needs to become much less capital intensive (inclusive of acquisitions) over time, as Google and Microsoft have done. That is the easy part. But margins must also stay near today’s level of about 50 per cent – which would be uncharted territory. And sales would have to grow at least sixfold in this period.