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A Water Landing for Facebook’s IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?

Screen Shot 2012 05 24 at 1.26.36 PM A Water Landing for Facebooks IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?

If Facebook sucked itself into oblivion via it’s flailing IPO and we had to find other social sites to chat on… Think of the windfall for EVERYONE ELSE! Let’s see how Zuck and co. handle the pressure. Sure they’ve now got bazillions and have make hundreds of millionaire coders and workers, BUT… Do you think the site will get BETTER or WORSE? Do you think Facebook’s Privacy Snafus will get BETTER or WORSE?

Let’s look at today’s numbers:

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20 billion dollars. That number is almost too staggering to imagine without some "like" comparisons.

Let’s look at Google:

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And Apple:

Screen Shot 2012 05 24 at 1.11.56 PM A Water Landing for Facebooks IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?

It’s all in that essential number, the Price/Earnings Ratio:

Screen Shot 2012 05 24 at 1.14.30 PM A Water Landing for Facebooks IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?

Okay, thus ends the financial overview of where Facebook’s 20 Billion dollar market cap places it. And hey, Instagram was just bought for 1 Billion and they didn’t have any true revenue stream at all. Oh, wait, Instagram was bought by Facebook. Okay… Let’s look at the social side of a failing Facebook.

facebook cheshire A Water Landing for Facebooks IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?

Who would benefit from a Facebook failure?

(beat)

Everybody.

(Everybody, except for the current investors, of course.)

What would happen if Facebook collapsed under the weight of it’s own successful unsuccessful IPO and the revenue numbers that "might" make it feasible?

We’d have to find other sites to get our "connective" fix. (Sites like LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ would experience a windfall of new users)

We could kiss Facebook’s shoddy "privacy" "non-privacy" issues goodbye. (Let the lawyers haggle about how to divvy up the assets.)

We’d have to revert to higher (phone, email, face-2-face) and lower (IM, txt, shout across a canyon) forms of communication.

We’d need a better digital scrapbooking and sharing system.

Every single company involved in social media would enjoy a huge uplift in potential audience and users.

We’d have to reach out each other directly rather than via superficial "likes" and "check-ins."

Bottom Line: A swift and agressive Facebook departure might not signal the end of the dot com bubble v 2.o, but the beginning of real growth and real potential to do it better. And you know the tech teams at Google+ and Pinterest are watching the current stock crisis and legal morass with hungry eyes.

The harder question to answer would be: Who wouldn’t benefit from a Facebook collapse?

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2012/05/facebooks-ipo/

Additional FB Failing Posts from Elsewhere:

Other posts to help you kick ass in social media:

Most people don’t really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can’t help it. (from Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement)


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