The CEO of the Nasdaq stock exchange says it is "humbly embarrassed" by its bungling of Facebook's hugely anticipated debut as a public company on Friday.

Robert Greifeld told news media there's no indication the delay contributed to the underwhelming performance of Facebook's stock, which ended at $38.23 — 23 cents above where it began.

Facebook's stock was expected to start trading at 11 a.m. but didn't open until 11:32 a.m., and some investors didn't learn for hours whether their orders went through.

Greifeld called the company's first day of trading "successful." He said late order cancellations caused a glitch, according to reports published Sunday. He said Nasdaq's board met Saturday and plans to change its IPO auction process.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has said it is investigating.

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AP

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg broke out a suit and tie for a meeting with Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda this year.

As Facebook nears its debut as a public company, would-be investors are pondering the $96 billion question: Can an eight-year-old company run by a hoodie-wearing 28-year-old possibly be worth that much?

Analysts are divided, with some suggesting that the valuation is simply too high, and others coming up with scenarios in which Facebook could be worth even more, given the right conditions and a leap of faith.

Andrew Sheehy, chief analyst at British-based Generator Research, says the number is too high, reflecting outsized expectations for the social networking company. A market cap of $100 billion would give Facebook a price-to-earnings ratio five times that of Apple, the nation's most valuable company. Apple clocks in at about 20 times earnings, based on its most recent fiscal year, while Facebook would be valued at 100 times its $1 billion in annual earnings.

Such P-E ratios are a typical way investors measure the value of a company, although they also have to factor in the rate of a comapny's growth. But even if Facebook profits grow rapidly it will be years before its P-E ratio comes down to the level of other tech companies.

Morningstar analyst Rick Summers offers a preliminary valuation of $71 billion for the company and forecast a growth trajectory that would bring Facebook up to $40 billion in revenue by 2021, from $3.7 billion last year.

Related: A non-investors guide to Facebook's IPO

"Facebook’s ownership and control of its user data affords it substantial competitive advantages," he wrote in a recent research note. "Within Facebook, the company continues to build a rich database of friends, actions, demographics and applications."

Most of Wall Street's top tech industry analysts are barred from commenting on the offering because they work for one of the 33 investment banks underwriting the massive offering, which is expected to be priced Thursday and begin trading Friday on the Nasdaq stock market.

That leaves investors largely on their own, especially since most individual investors will be unable to buy shares until they begin trading publicly, when they easily could be far more expensive than the initial public offering price, which will value the company at an estimated $77 billion to $96 billion, according to the latest documents filed with federal regulators.

Facebook's 900 million-plus user base is far and away its biggest asset. It represents a huge number of eyeballs for exposure-hungry advertisers, along with a vast warehouse of data about users' online behaviors, preferences and habits. The company has done a good job of turning that data into dollars so far but will have to invent new ways to make that data generate revenue to justify such a rich valuation, analysts said.

Facebook recently raised eyebrows by reporting quarterly profits that were below year-ago levels, although revenues rose 45 percent.

"Growth is decelerating, but it's decelerating from enormous down to large," said Barry Randall, chief investment officer at Crabtree Asset Management LLC. "Its major problem now is managing people's expectations."

Summers, of Morningstar, acknowledged that the IPO hype glosses over some shorter-term issues with which Zuckerberg and his team will have to deal. "The market may be underestimating several near-term challenges for the company," he wrote.

Some analysts voiced concern that the rapid increase in Facebook's mobile traffic will continue to erode ad revenues. In March, the company had 488 million mobile users, which presents a challenge because the small screen size of smartphones means much less real estate for ads.

In an amended filing with federal regulators last week, Facebook said, "Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where our ability to monetize is unproven, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results."

"The rapid shift from online usage to mobile devices that are harder to monetize is harming Facebook's growth prospects in the near and medium terms," Sam Hamadeh, founder and CEO of PrivCo, which does research on privately held companies, said in a report. Even analysts who are more positive agree that growth is slowing.

Related: Facebook sees growing shift to less lucrative mobile use

In a research note in response to Facebook's recent disclosure of weaker revenue numbers, analyst Ken Sena at Evercore Partners lowered estimates for revenue and earnings margins, although he still said the company was worth $130 billion to $150 billion.

Even if Facebook figures out a way to tuck ads into smartphone news feeds without alienating users, Sheehy said relying on online ads isn't going to be enough. "They have done a very, very good job at executing target advertising," he said, which is why Facebook was able to generate what Sheehy, of Generator Research, called its "tremendously impressive" $3.7 billion in revenue last year. 

"But it's just not going to scale," he said. Even if Facebook triples ad revenue to $12 billion by 2016, that's nowhere near enough to justify a $96 billion valuation, he said. To do that, "They'd have to develop a completely new incremental business."

Analysts have plenty of ideas about how Facebook could do this. Morningstar's Summer pointed out that the site has already morphed from a social destination to an identity for users to log into other websites. It's also a platform for a growing slate of apps and layered networks like BranchOut, which Randall suggested could become a revenue stream in the future.

Related: On Wall Street, it's shaping up as hoodies vs. the suits

Eventually, he predicted, "They'll monetize it by allowing smaller companies to build businesses on top of their database and eventually charge them for doing so." The site also does a robust business in the sale of virtual goods, which could be the first step into selling physical goods and expanding into the burgeoning e-commerce and payments arena, following in the footsteps of eBay.

It's not impossible. Apple grew faster than Facebook would need to in order to justify a $96 billion valuation, but Sheehy pointed out Apple also revolutionized both the music industry and the mobile phone market. That sets the bar high for Facebook.

Evercore's Sena has faith.

"We believe that Facebook's ad model is only now just beginning to reflect the power of its audience platform," he wrote. "Moreover, while we continue to believe that Facebook will redefine advertising and that the company is on course to be the most valuable media company in existence."

Less than two weeks before the potential launch of Facebook’s initial public offering roadshow, a string of acquisitions and other business distractions are threatening to delay the sale, say people familiar with the matter.

Facebook management has been eyeing a May offering, with a roadshow launch as early as May 7 and the start of trading late the week of the 14th, people with knowledge of the deal have said. But in recent weeks, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been more focused on running the business and making acquisitions than on preparing for the share sale, according to one of these people, making it hard for him and other managers to focus wholeheartedly on the IPO preparations.

As a result of that, Facebook is more likely to launch its roadshow on May 14, or even as late as the very end of May, say the people familiar with the matter. That is a start date that would likely delay the initial trading until early or mid-June. That’s because the Memorial Day holiday, which is May 28, will likely mean that the stock market is less liquid, and therefore less hospitable, to a new issue like Facebook for several trading days late in May, making it a bad time to be on the road or to launch trading.

Effectively, says one person familiar with the matter, Facebook is looking at a “Plan A, B, C, and a D” for its IPO.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the expected timing of the deal.

Having a CEO like Zuckerberg whose bias is to hunker down and do his job rather than fixating on potential stock prices and investors may be more an asset than a liability. However, Zuckerberg’s surprise decisions to buy Instagram for $1 billion over the course of a weekend and a $550 million patent portfolio from Microsoft have created the need for additional financial disclosures with the SEC, say lawyers and other people familiar with the matter, and answering all the Commission’s questions could take additional time.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

CNBC.com: The 10 biggest internet IPOs

CNBC.com: Inside Facebook headquarters

CNBC.com: Nasdaq 100 changes listing rules to woo Facebook IPO

CNBC.com: Facebook IPO could stand in the way of sell-in-May

Handout / Reuters

Traders gather for the IPO of Tumi Holdings on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of the high-end luggage maker soared in their market debut.

It’s starting to feel a lot like 2000 on Wall Street right now.

A rising stock market, a rash of technology startups and investors eager to put money to work on Wall Street is heating up the market for initial public offerings.

And those IPOs are not only garnering interest from investors, they’re going off with a bang.

So far, 2012 has been the biggest year for first-day IPO price surges since 2000, the era of the dot-com bubble, according to data from IPO research company Renaissance Capital. On average, IPOs have gained 19 percent on their first day of trading this year, Renaissance data show -- well above the average 10 percent gain seen in 2011 and 2010.

In 2000, the average first-day gain for an IPO was 56 percent, according to Renaissance.

IPOs are also paying off for investors longer-term, said Kathleen Shelton Smith, co-founder and chairman of Renaissance.

She notes that the FTSE Renaissance Global IPO Index, which measures the performance of a basket individual stocks for two years their market debut, shows a return of 15.6 percent so far this year.

That’s better than a 10 percent return for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, a broad market measure, over the same period. And in 2011 the FTSE Renaissance Global IPO Index was down 21 percent compared with a flat return for the S&P 500, she added.

“That tells you that IPOs are working so far this year,” Smith said.

On Thursday shares of luggage maker Tumi jumped 47 percent on their market debut, while data-analysis company Splunk saw its share price soar 109 percent in a single day, chalking up the largest first-day gain for stock IPO so far this year -- that’s especially remarkable given that the rest of the stock market moved lower.

Those first-day performances follow similar stock pops from organic mac n’ cheese maker Annie’s and mobile advertising firm Millennial Media, and they come ahead of Facebook’s highly anticipated IPO, which is expected to be just weeks away.

The heat-up in the IPO market is being driven by a number of factors, including optimism about a rash of new tech IPOs, including names like LinkedIn and Zynga, and also a strong rise in stock prices over the past six months.

The types of companies coming to market are also leading to the large stock price movements, Francis Gaskins, president and editor of IPOdesktop.com, told CNBC Friday.

“A lot of these IPOs are small,” he said. “The average IPO this year has been $116 million, and when you get IPOs like that it’s not hard for them to go up.”

Facebook has homed in on two possible dates to launch its initial public offering on the Nasdaq, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bankers and management are currently looking at a primary target date of May 16 or 17 to price the deal (with trading commencing the following day), according to this person, and trading would commence the following morning. The company would begin marketing the deal on May 7 under that scenario.

The final timing, however, will be highly dependent on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s review of Facebook’s recently announced $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. While bankers expect the commission to give the deal a go-ahead by the end of April, unforeseen comments or questions from regulators could push IPO pricing back by roughly one week.

If that were the case, the company would default to a plan B, which would aim to price the deal on May 23 or 24 and begin trading the following day.

Under either scenario, Facebook is leaning towards a 10-day period to market the deal with investors – known as a road show – which will primarily focus on domestic investors in hubs like New York, Silicon Valley, and Boston, according to this person. The company is considering meeting with prospective investors abroad in Europe, but would keep that trip brief (if it happens at all). Typically, road shows for large IPOs last around 14 days.

While prospective investors, bankers and industry experts expect demand to be significantly robust for Facebook’s offering, some of the company’s bankers have expressed worry about a shortened marketing period according to the person familiar with the timetable.

If management is not be able to accommodate meetings with some large investors, it could result in tension among some members of the company’s investor base, they warn.

Last week, Facebook chose the Nasdaq over the New York Stock Exchange to list the deal. The company has filed for a $5 billion offering, but is expected to raise around $10 billion by the time the deal is launched.

The IPO is being led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Barclays, Allen & Company, and a consortium of roughly 25 other banks advising on the deal.

A spokesperson from Facebook declined to comment on the company’s IPO timing.

More from CNBC.com:

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Paul Sakuma / AP

Inside the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

By msnbc.com news services

Facebook is wooing advertisers, unveiling new pages and ways for businesses to plug their brands on the social network and paving the way for more corporate users as it prepares for a multibillion-dollar IPO.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg launched the charm offensive Wednesday, touting revamped pages or mini-websites and timelines that marketers can use to promote brands and businesses to Facebook's 845 million members.

The new features let companies, as well as celebrities and brands, create self-contained mini-websites within Facebook using the Timeline format it introduced for users' profile pages earlier this year.

Facebook Pages will be available for smartphones starting later this year, executives said at an event attended by hundreds of advertising and marketing executives.

Facebook recently filed to raise a targeted $5 billion in a hotly anticipated initial public offering that is expected to value the company at $75 billion to $100 billion.

Some investors worry about Facebook's over-reliance on advertising dollars. Businesses can set up pages on Facebook for free, but the idea, executives said, is that companies whose pages attract a lot of customers might be interested in advertising on the service as well.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Investors, social media watchers and Facebook users may be looking forward to the social network’s expected public stock offering later this year, but corporate governance experts aren’t quite so enthusiastic.

Earlier this month, Facebook filed for a $5 billion IPO -- a deal that would be one of the biggest public stock offerings ever and values the social media juggernaut at about $100 billion.

Those sorts of numbers, coupled with the company’s strong brand name, are likely to draw interest from individual investors eager to buy a piece of the company. Governance experts caution, however, that while buying a hot company like Facebook feels good now, potential investors should be wary of the stringent executive control structure outlined in the company’s IPO registration document.

“Right now you have a situation at Facebook where there’s a benevolent dictatorship, but my concern is they tend to become malevolent dictatorships, and that can hurt you when it comes to the pinch,” said Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Damodaran notes that, based on information in the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook’s founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg would retain complete control of the company for the foreseeable future and would even have the right to appoint his own successor before he dies.

Facebook has also set up defenses against takeovers and proxy fights, when shareholders unite to force changes at the directorial and management level.

Key to Facebook’s stringent control structure is its dual stock ownership structure, where a company issues two classes of shares with different voting and ownership rights. The system allows the company’s founders and management to maintain control, but still solicit investments from the public, Damodaran said.

“This system has been foreign to the U.S. and for a long time it wasn’t a common thing here, but you can blame Google for its return,” he said, noting that the search firm used the format when it launched its IPO in 2004 and has inspired a number of the new Internet technology firms now launching IPOs to follow suit.

“Whether this is fair or not fair, people still want to buy stocks like Facebook because this is a hot sector, and when that’s the case companies can basically write the rules,” Damodaran said. “I don’t have any objections to Zuckerberg as a CEO; I think he has done a good job. But I don’t think it’s in shareholders’ interests to sign him on for life. Investors should discount the possibility that there’s a crisis for the company down the road, and if one happens they will not have much of a say.”

A case in point is Yahoo, Damodaran added. Fifteen years ago the search company was the darling of Wall Street, well managed and well run. Ten years later it was a “disaster waiting to happen” and rejected Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar takeover offer that some shareholders may have preferred it to accept.

“So let’s say for example that in 10 years’ time there’s some disaster at Facebook and it receives a takeover offer from Apple,” he continued. “Shareholders might want the company to take the offer, but if Zuckerberg says it can’t go through it doesn’t happen. Sometimes it’s best for a company in trouble to clean house and do away with management and the board and be acquired at the best price.”

If you’re planning on buying Facebook’s shares in the hopes that the company will eventually update its governance structure, you’re likely to be disappointed, notes Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in corporate governance issues.

“The evidence suggests that the corporate governance structure you have in place when you go public tends to stay in place,” he said.

But companies have an incentive to put in place a governance structure that leans more toward a democracy than a dictatorship, he added, pointing to research that shows greater democracy toward shareholders increases a company’s return on assets -- a measure of its profitability -- and its stock performance.

“So managers should be responsive to their shareholders, but in the end we all want roughly the same thing -- we want the company running well and we want it to make a profit, so we should probably leave them alone,” he said.

I wouldn’t want a company manager to listen to every whim of their shareholders, like politicians who pander to every whim of the electorate, he said.

“It’s not a brilliant way to run the country and not good way to run a firm.”

Do you think Facebook's IPO will be a good bet? Let us know on Facebook.

By msnbc.com staff

Online review site Yelp has set a price target for its planned public stock offering, which could raise as much as $115 million in what would likely be the first IPO for a major Internet company this year.

Based in San Francisco, the user-generated review website said Thursday it plans to sell 7.1 million shares for $12 to $14 each, while its charitable foundation will sell 50,000 shares and investment bankers have the option to sell an additional 1.07 million shares.

Michael Pachter, director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, sees the potential for strong upside growth for Yelp.

A fraction of the businesses listed on the website have actually formed an official partnership with the company, he said -- that’s 16,000 businesses out of 20 million listed.

“It tells me there’s a huge upside if these guys are successful at getting businesses to see the value of being listed on the site and having reviews, but they are in their infancy [now],”Pachter said.

“They have 66 million unique visitors. That customer list is worth a ton. I see the value in what they do and I see how hard it’s going to be to replicate,” he continued. “I think they are very much like Yahoo was with search. It became synonymous with search, and Yelp is synonymous with recommendations.”

Yelp filed registration documents to go public three months ago, and now looks to be within weeks of its first stock offering, as IPO pricings usually happen a few weeks before a company enters the public markets. The company’s shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “YELP.”

Yelp could raise less money in its IPO, as it depends on investor demand and appetite for shares. However, the stock offering is sure to draw investor interest, as it will likely come ahead of Facebook’s planned public stock offering. The largest social-networking website filed papers earlier this month for a $5 billion offering.

Yelp’s IPO is part of a rash of Internet offerings over the past few months. So far, social media companies Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn have made their stock market debuts, with mixed results.

The Malkin family bought the Empire State Building in 2002 and, after much wrangling, gained total control of the 102-story building in 2010.

Pssst. Hey, buddy! Wanna buy the Empire State Building?

It's an old joke, at least among New Yorkers, but it will soon have a bit of the ring of truth to it. Empire State Realty Trust Inc., the company that owns the iconic 102-story building on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, has filed to sell investors $1 billion worth of its Class A shares, the company said Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Reuters reported that the tower, once the tallest in the world, has seen several owners over the decades and had been at the centre of a legal battle among the Malkin family, property tycoon Donald Trump and real estate heiress Leona Helmsley.

The Malkin family bought the property in 2002 and, after much wrangling, gained total control of the 102-story building in 2010.

In November, Malkin Holdings had said it would likely file to become a publicly traded real estate investment trust within three months.

Like a slew of recent tech and internet IPOs, the company will have two classes of stock -- class A share being sold to the public worth one vote and class B shares with 50 votes each. The structure gives significant control to the Malkin family.

The proceeds will be used to pay existing stakeholders in the buildings who chose to receive cash in exchange for their interests, and to repay debt.

The REIT plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "ESB."

The Empire State Building held its own in the New York commercial real estate market -- even when Lehman's bankruptcy sent rents tumbling and tenants negotiated leaner terms -- helped by the expensive renovations to its Art Deco structure.

Two years ago, the building's owners embarked on a $500 million project to bring the skyscraper, completed in 1931, to modern environmental standards.

In its filing, the company said it currently plans to invest between $175 million and $215 million of additional capital through the end of 2013, to continue to renovate and reposition its properties.

On a pro forma basis, the company generated revenue of about $156.7 million from the building, for the nine months ended September 30. In total, it earned $71 million, rebounding from lows during the financial crisis.

While large banks tend to be the high-octane fuel that drives New York commercial real estate rents, the REIT counts just one mega-bank, Citigroup , among its top 5 tenants.

The other large tenants are asset manager Legg Mason ; insurer Odyssey America Reinsurance; cosmetic company Elizabeth Arden Inc ; and financial data provider Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters News.

Though the skyscraper, also known for its starring role in the movie King Kong, accounts for the largest chunk of the REIT's revenue, the company also owns 12 office properties and 6 standalone retail properties, as of September 30, mostly located in midtown Manhattan.

In its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs are underwriting the IPO.

A REIT is a real estate-linked company that can avoid paying U.S. corporate income taxes if it distributes at least 90 percent of its taxable income to shareholders.

The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filing is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO can be different.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Do you want to buy a piece of the Empire State Building? Share your thoughts on Facebook.

A giant 'like' icon made popular by Facebook is seen at the company's new headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Facebook was famously born in a Harvard dorm room, which might be why its much-hyped valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion seems to suffer from grade inflation.

Facebook pulled back the curtain on some of its financials in its IPO filing yesterday, and analysts started combing through it immediately. Even the ones who are positive about Facebook's long-term potential — and not all of them are — concede that a valuation of up to $100 billion basically bakes in the assumption that the social network will become the next Google — or better.

The divide seems to be between those who think Zuckerberg and his team have the chops to live up to their early potential, and those who don't.

Facebook has a lot going for it: 845 million active monthly users, more than $3 billion in annual revenue and a still-galloping growth rate. Its profit margin of 27 percent last year also compares favorably with fellow Internet giant Google's 26 percent.

But a valuation even at the low end of the $75 billion to $100 billion range that's been thrown around is out of sync with the revenue and income numbers in its filing statement. At $75 billion, Facebook would be worth about 40 percent of Google — a company that had profits about 11 times Facebook's. What's more, some analysts already see signs that Facebook's momentum is slowing.

Facebook shares traded privately at just around $30 a share in the fourth quarter of last year, which would give the company a valuation of $80 billion, give or take. (In the wake of its filing, that figure jumped to nearly $90 billion.) Its net income of $1 billion last year also offers encouragement to the argument that $100 billion is plausible.

"This is a single most important filing and IPO to come around probably since Google, and Google did not have nearly the brand recognition and ubiquitous nature" Facebook enjoys, said David Menlow, president of IPOfinancial.com. 

Google didn't face the same competition for online ad dollars and eyeballs when it went public in 2004, either.

"This is where some of our optimism tempers a bit," said Rick Summers, senior equity analyst at Morningstar. Google's "silver bullet" was the development of its AdWords platform. "We had a performance-based advertising system that provided an immediate, measurable return on investment for advertisers. Google really defined the category and the trajectory of that market," he said. 

"There's been so much hype about Facebook, but I don't see it supported by the numbers," said Francis Gaskins, president and editor of IPODesktop.com. Google has a market capitalization of 19 times its net income, he points out. Assuming that Facebook is in the same league as Google, that would only give it a valuation of $19 billion. 

There are other skeptics, too.

"The big question is, Can Facebook maintain its growth rates?" said Sam Hamadeh, CEO of research company PrivCo. While Facebook prefers to focus on its monthly active user base and global growth, Hamadeh said that a look at more mature markets shows signs of trouble ahead.

"The U.S. and Canada went from 124 million to 126 million (users) from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. That's pretty concerning," Hamadeh said.

Morningstar's Summers also pointed out that Facebook will hit a wall, so to speak, in its growth when it comes to China, where access is restricted.

Menlow, for one, isn't ruffled by these projections. Even if growth of new users slows, the company can offset that by figuring out how to make more money from existing users. There are two main channels for this, both of which Facebook is already using.

The first is advertising. Facebook has an unparalleled amount of detailed, intimate data about its users, and a platform that can unlock the value of all those links and likes for advertisers will go a long way toward bolstering its bottom line. 

But Facebook can also earn money from users directly. Last year, 12 percent of its revenue came from its relationship with Zynga, much of that in the form of virtual goods bought by players of Zynga's popular games. The flip side of this advantage is that an increasing share of the money Facebook makes depends on Zynga creating the next addictive game. As anyone in the movie business would be quick to point out, it can be expensive to keep chasing after the next blockbuster. 

Without a silver bullet like AdWords, Facebook will have an uphill climb trying to sustain growth in ad revenues. While the 69 percent increase it saw between 2010 and 2011 would be amazing for a more established company, the promise of Facebook's sky-high valuation is that its growth will be by leaps and bounds.

And according to Hamadeh, the company is already reaching the outer limit of how many ads it can cram on to a page without turning users off.

"At one point they had two ads per page ... about two weeks ago, you started seeing six and seven," Hamadeh said. Some people are already implementing ad-blocking apps, he added. "That doesn't bode well."

Related:

Facebook’s IPO explained ... in cartoon form!

States have $ signs in their eyes over Facebook IPO

Is Facebook really worth $100 billion? Share your thoughts on our Facebook page. If that seems too weird, tweet your thoughts @msnbc_business.

While you probably won't receive so much as a virtual sack of FarmVille pumpkin seeds from Facebook's long-awaited IPO — set to grant Facebook's shareholders millions and billions — there is one thing you'll get out of the deal: a chance to ogle the social network's private business, sort of like it's been doing to you for years.

Privacy advocates have long scrutinized how Facebook deals with privacy and security of its users, but now that Facebook is going public, "disclosure rules affecting publicly traded companies may force Facebook to reveal privacy-related investigations that it otherwise might have kept secret," Ars Technica notes. What's more, the filing informs us about Facebook's own concerns.

Facebook

The required IPO filing references Facebook's recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, stemming from social network's massive privacy rollback in 2009. It also makes note of a current privacy audit by the Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, the result of 22 complaints made against the social network by Austrian privacy advocacy, Europe versus Facebook.

Given Facebook's growing omnipresence in our daily lives, you've probably heard about one or both of these investigations, thanks to privacy watchdogs. But as Ars Technica points out, Facebook, as a private company, was never obligated to tell you. Now that it's going public, Facebook must tell the world what's going on, and how it might affect shareholders. Take, for example, this segment from Facebook's filing:  

It is possible that a regulatory inquiry might result in changes to our policies or practices. Violation of existing or future regulatory orders or consent decrees could subject us to substantial monetary fines and other penalties that could negatively affect our financial condition and results of operations. In addition, it is possible that future orders issued by, or enforcement actions initiated by, regulatory authorities could cause us to incur substantial costs or require us to change our business practices in a manner materially adverse to our business.

What else is Facebook worried about? The Sophos security blog points to No. 23 in the Facebook filing, under risks that may harm the business:

Computer malware, viruses and computer hacking and phishing attacks have become more prevalent in our industry, have occurred on our systems in the past, and may occur on our systems in the future ... As a result of spamming activities, our users may use Facebook less or stop using our products altogether.

"Facebook acknowledging the risks of privacy investigations, malware harming its systems and users and people abandoning the service if it becomes overwhelmed with spam shows they are cognizant of the risk and will now be even more motivated to reduce it," writes Sophos Senior Security Advisor  Chester Wisniewski.

Even though most of us won't earn a dime from Facebook's IPO, our privacy and security may be all the richer for it.

More on the annoying way we live now:

• Facebook offers plenty of reasons not to like its shares
• FTC settlement aside, Facebook still owns your privacy
• FTC head calls out Facebook, Google on Data Privacy Day
• 7 signs we're living in the post-privacy era

 Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about privacy and then asks her to join her on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+. Because that's how she rolls.

Among the myriad investors out there salivating over the prospect of a Facebook initial public offering (and the slews of millionaires it will create), there's one group you may not have thought of: the people who manage states' finances.

They see all those potential Facebook millionaires and billionaires as eventual taxpayers who can help fill their coffers and close their budget gaps.

California is a case in point. According to the Sacramento Bee, the state's non-partisan Legislative Analyst's Office has started calling the potential tax windfall for the state's finances "The Facebook Effect." It estimates California could reap as much as $1 billion over the next few years.

It could be a case of counting chicks before they hatch, though. The benefit the state (or any state) receives from the Facebook Effect will only come if and when investors sell their shares. To help reduce California's current $9.2 billion budget gap, investors would need to receive and then sell their shares before the end of the year.

That hasn't stopped state officials from dreaming, however. 

"We don't know what the specific amount is going to be, but if it's as significant as it's projected, then on behalf of a very grateful state, I will happily go to Mark Zuckerberg's house and wash his windows or mow his lawn," the Bee said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Department of Finance, quipped.

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