by Jimnasium
20th May, 2012
So the recent IPO (initial public offering) by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has been quite a fizzer. The market hasn't moved much above $38.00 a share which is where the company started when first floated despite the media driven idea that Facebook was going to dominate the stock market.
To be honest I was surprised by this as were professional market guesstimators. I had expected a more gullible public to fall even further for the world's biggest castle-built-on-sand scheme and send Zuckerberg into the ionosphere of wealth, he is nearly there but not quite, but there is something to the idea that "money talks, bulls**t walks" and Facebook is definitely over-hyped bs.
Perhaps this was the kick in the teeth Facebook needed to bring it down to earth. The constant privacy revisions which undermine user settings and obvious data aggregation have gained the ire of a good many users, plenty have decided to delete their account altogether, although even that is not always successful unless done properly. Many more are switching off after becoming tired of the drooling inanity and self-centredness, which nobody else actually cares about, of the entire concept. It isn't called 'Fakebook' by some for nothing.
The mixed bag nature of Facebook where work-mates, family, recreation or social groups and political/religious contacts are all rolled into one giant aircraft hangar of 'friends' makes many people very uncomfortable.
The very thought that Zuckerberg has managed to build himself a multi-billion dollar empire from all of this still baffles, and in some cases raises the suspicions of, many, including myself. So will Facebook ever go away? Eventually. But not until people have some other way of getting their five seconds of fame. In the meantime, the rest of us should do everything we can to stop feeding the beast.
