[via theatlantic]:

Facebook’s Value: What’s the Price of a Billion People Watching Each Other?

Is Facebook’s IPO the next chapter in the greatest company of our time, or are Friday’s buyers total suckers?

The only intelligent, honest, and true thing to say about this inevitable question is that nobody has any clue. In 1992, a company called America Online had a $70 million valuation after its IPO. A decade later, it was worth $150 billion. A decade after that peak, it is now worth only $1 billion. Online fortunes are built on hyper-active tectonic plates. Mountains of wealth accumulate from flat nothingness, rumble, push up toward the sky, and with alarming frequency, blow themselves up. The Internet is a super-seismic place. […]

It is freakin’ crazy. If Facebook were merely the widest social network by number of users, dayenu. If it were the deepest social network by the quality of engagement and the quantity of personal detail, dayenu. But it’s the widest and the deepest! That sort of thing has to be worth $100 billion, right?

Right?

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Money money money.