Facebook had another tough day today in the public markets, with shares now trading at around $28 after debuting less than two weeks ago at $42.05. Good timing, then, for a new slideshow report out today from the boutique French consulting firm faberNovel, which encourages us to look at the bigger picture, and why, in its words, Facebook is “the perfect startup.”

The mammoth slideshow (after the break) is an annual thing for faberNovel, which picks one company to tackle each year — others have included how Amazon controls e-commerce, how Apple dominates, and what could go wrong with Google. Like those before, the one out today on Facebook is a deep-dive into the company, and it looks not just at the origins of the social network, but what sets it apart from other attempts at global social networks — and other startups. (And by the way, faberNovel sees all this drama and attention on the IPO as just “one point on a startup trajectory.” Some investors may not feel quite the same.)

In 94 fairly packed slides (no Kreiger approach here), there is a huge amount of data, occasionally usefully visualizing some of the biggest challenges the company faces. (Example: Facebook’s monetization issue. It is getting ten times more traffic than YouTube, but only one-tenth the revenue of YouTube’s owner, Google.)

A little later, looking back at Facebook’s different tests with advertising, faberNovel makes a good argument for how a lack of success with more traditional models has contributed to it being such an innovative company. Specifically, around new, social ad formats (that’s slide 34), even if some of those formats have yet to pay off when compared to how much time users spend on the site.

“Facebook has no choice but to change the game’s rules,” faberNovel explains, which is perhaps the crux of why it has done so well.

What caught my attention the most — possibly because of all the news of the past week swirling around Facebook and its mobile plans — was faberNovel’s take on Facebook’s mobile business.

Facebook already has a huge amount of users on mobile (more than 400 million of its 901 million active users are accessing by mobile), but it could quite possibly get squeezed out of mobile altogether because of Apple and Google’s own control of the ecosystems, and the fact that eventually other and better mobile apps will come along.

That has left Facebook with no choice but to beef up with acquisitions, more features and its own beginnings of a mobile platform. Specifically, faberNovel believes the App Center could really become a game-changer and the lynchpin for how Facebook begins to “own” its users on mobile devices.

FaberNovel then takes this one step further and proclaims that, with its large mobile user base and variety of services, “Facebook is a new breed of telco.”

It even idly wonders if the company could, one day, even operate its own ad-hoc Mesh network to put the final piece into the puzzle. Is that a speculation too far? In a world of $100-billion-plus valuations for largely free services, perhaps anything is possible.

Pain, pain, and more pain for Facebook’s stock. Facebook sunk into the $20s for the first time today, declining about 9 percent as options trading started. The decline also came a day after a third wave of reports came out about a Facebook phone, which would push the company into the risky and expensive world of building hardware.

Shares hit a new low of $28.65 and have closed nearly 10 percent lower at $28.84. After-hours trading has the company down another 0.5 percent to $28.69. That gives the company a market capitalization of $79.02 billion, down from $115 billion market cap Facebook opened at on the day of its IPO when it started trading at $42.05 a share.** (That said, if you’re a glass-is-half-full kind of person, Facebook is now cheap, cheap, cheap!)

The key factor affecting share prices might be options trading. Bloomberg said that puts are exceeding calls by 1.3-to-1. Puts give investors the right to sell stock at a certain price while calls give them the ability to buy stock at a given price. Puts increase in value as shares decline. Bloomberg said the June $30 puts were the most-active contracts.

Like I said in a story from late last night, analysts reduced their estimates for the second quarter and I am also hearing from sources that the third quarter will be soft too. Facebook will need to boost revenue streams outside of display advertising on its own site to get shares back up. There are lots of possibilities. We could see Karma turning into an interesting gifting revenue stream, improved search becoming the basis of Google-like advertising, an Adsense-like display advertising network across the web and an expansion of payments and Facebook Credits outside of social gaming.

**It looks like everyone is coming up with a different market cap for Facebook. Google and Yahoo Finance report Facebook’s market cap as being around $62 billion. The Wall Street Journal is saying that Facebook’s market cap was $80.4 billion on today’s low. I called around to sources who facilitated the offering and the correct number of shares to use is 2.74 billion. Multiply that by the current price and you get the market cap (which is different from the incorrect numbers that Yahoo and Google Finance are reporting).

Link shortener Bitly today launched a major redesign and number of new features that all add up to what the company itself calls “a new Bitly.” Among these new features are ‘bitmarks,’ Bitly’s name for its new bookmarking features, the ability to search and find these bookmarks, a fast search functionality, as well as enhanced public profiles that give users more privacy control. Bitly is also rolling out new bookmarklets, a Chrome extension and its first iPhone app.

Ever since its launch in 2008, Bitly has been a major part of the social sharing ecosystem on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Bitly’s users currently save about 100 million links per day and the company tells us that over 25 billion Bitly links have been created thus far. The company registers about 300 million clicks on its links every day – that’s about 1% of all clicks on the Internet.

The focus of today’s launch is clearly on giving its users more curation features. The new “bitmarks” allow you to easily go back and look at the links you’ve shared on Facebook and Twitter. You can also, of course, still organize these links into bundles – a feature the company introduced in 2010. With this release, Bitly also made organizing these bundles more collaborative and now makes it more obvious “that you can invite people to collaborate and edit a bundle with you.”

Bitly now also features a network view that lets you see the links your friends are sharing publicly on Twitter and Facebook.

Bitly stresses that this update is meant to make the services” the single best place for you to save and share your links and to discover interesting things from your friends and the entire web.”

Starting today, developers will be able to use Bitly’s open API to add these “bitmarking functionality” to their apps as well.

Here is the full list of Bitly’s updates:

• Easily save, share and discover links — they’re called bitmarks, like bookmarks.
• Instantly search your saved bitmarks.
• Curate groups of bitmarks into bundles and collaborate on bundles with friends.
• Make any bitmark or bundle private or public.
• See what friends are sharing across multiple social networks, all in one place.
• Save and share links from anywhere with our new bitmarklet, Chrome extension and iPhone app.

The Facebook IPO was supposed to be Silicon Valley’s shining moment. It’s the book-end for the decade of recovery that followed the first wave of consumer Internet companies. It was the debutante ball for the next great Silicon Valley company, the one with the most potential to last a generation or longer.

Instead, it’s turned into a public relations disaster. If we look a little more closely though, the Facebook IPO probably has more devastating consequences for the rest of the late-stage private market than it does for the company itself.

The late-stage market may have to reprice: Facebook is the latest major consumer Internet IPO that has underperformed compared to where it traded in secondary markets. In the final weeks of secondary market trading, we were seeing shares change hands at $40 and $44 a piece. Even though trading volumes aren’t that high in these secondary markets, Facebook had the most activity and it had years of pricing history.

The thought was that those prices were probably close to the public market prices. It was going to be hard to gauge what turned out to be an abnormally high amount of interest from retail investors. Those secondary markets may have helped convince Morgan Stanley and Facebook to raise the range from to the original $28 to $35 to the higher $34 to $38 range.

But actually, later-stage valuations were kind of wrong. Zynga and Groupon are in similar positions. Investors like T. Rowe Price who went in on Zynga’s Series C round in February 2011, bought shares at $14.03 a piece. They’re now at $6.61. (Sad face.)

Secondary market buyers just need to be a little more cautious about investing in pre-IPO companies if they are not in it for the long haul. It’s still possible to make money. It’s just that public markets are not blindly going to 2X or 3X a late-stage valuation. Investors that gave Groupon, like, a billion dollars a year and a half ago are still in the black. They paid what is now $7.90 a share, if you factor in stock splits. Now the shares are at $12.05. The last big financing round in Facebook is also up by about 80 percent from a year ago, when Goldman Sachs went in on Facebook at a $50 billion valuation.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson said, “Wall Street is going to value your business on your growth rate and your cash flow. Once you go public, you’re going to have to deal with a different kind of investor.”

He added, “The IPO market is back. But what people have to recognize is that companies are not going to get valued in public markets the same way they were valued in the late-stage market. The late-stage market is giving higher valuations than the public market is, so that means that the late-stage market is going to have to settle down.”

So investors need to be more conservative about how they think public markets will ultimately value their late-stage deals. Evernote at $1 billion? Dropbox at $4 billion? Spotify at $4 billion? These companies can only go out to public markets at those valuations if they have the current run-rate and growth trajectory to support them.

Facebook can overcome this if it has another “Calm down. Breathe.” moment:

If we’re debating about whether this was a “good” IPO or a “clusterfuck” of an IPO, it really depends on whose point of view you’re taking.

If you’re looking at the long-term picture for Facebook, the IPO was not bad at all. They raised $16 billion, with about $7 billion going directly into the company and the rest going toward early shareholders. Even though Facebook had the worst five-day start for an IPO out of the largest deals of the last decade, the company is washing out more of the short-term speculators, leaving room for believers who will hold the stock for the long-haul.

Also remember: Pissing people off, then apologizing and iterating your way out of it is classic behavior for Facebook. Facebook usually does one thing a year ago that really pisses people off. Then they fix it. It’s what they do. It’s never really intentional either. The euphemism for this is, “Move Fast. Break Things.” The only reason they can’t address the situation is because of the quiet period, but they’ll have a strategy once they’re out.

If we’re looking at Morgan Stanley, it’s complicated (hah). They’ve demonstrated to pre-IPO candidates in Silicon Valley that they will stand by their clients, support the price and take some bad publicity. If I were a company thinking of going public, it might be pretty attractive that Morgan Stanley appears willing to eat dirt for Facebook. But on the other hand, if I were a retail investor, I would be more skeptical of technology offerings they bring to the market in the future.

The next several quarters will be tough. Facebook has to prove it has more than display advertising:

While some analysts have already lowered second quarter estimates, I’ve also heard that the third quarter is projected to be soft too.

Chris Dixon said it best. Advertising that is about generating intent has lower value because it’s farther from the point of purchase. For a few years, Facebook’s theory has been that the sheer number of ads that generate demand on the web is something like 10X larger than the amount of ads at the bottom of the funnel (e.g. Google’s search ads). They believe the volume makes up for lower cost-per-click numbers.

But the sequential quarter-over-quarter decline in advertising revenue suggests that Facebook will need more legs to stand on. Flat quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in payments also suggests that the gaming vertical is mature and that Facebook will have to expand payments to other areas very, very soon.

The company will have to rebound on other business models. The Karma acquisition could lay the groundwork for a real gifting service across the entire site tied to birthdays. If even a single-digit percentage of Facebook’s 901 million users start buying birthday gifts for their friends multiple times a year through the site or mobile app, that’s not an insignificant revenue stream.

They could also launch a web-side display advertising network, an AdSense-killer if you will. But it’s not clear how much extra revenue that would add since Facebook already has a significant share of all display impressions across the web.

Even though mobile is tough right now, Facebook actually has a notable competitive advantage over rival mobile ad networks. If Apple fully removes the UDID soon, it will damage everyone else’s targeting abilities. But since Facebook knows who its users are and has recorded their tastes and preferences for years, that’s not as much a problem for them. They could launch a mobile display advertising network for all apps. Again, mobile display advertising is a tough business that isn’t producing that much revenue for anyone (even Google and Apple), but Facebook could take the lead if it pushed hard enough.

But remember that Facebook is a company that is built for the long-term: Despite the noise right now, Facebook is the one company out of the last generation of Silicon Valley startups that has enough untapped opportunities and is sufficiently mission-driven to keep attracting the best talent for years to come. Apple CEO Tim Cook even said that Facebook is the company that’s “closest” to being like Apple, according to Fortune.

If the shares fall too much by the six-month lock-up date, I would not be surprised if the company did something to make its employees feel more comfortable with their compensation (especially as the headhunters come out). This is an industry where it only takes a decade to become a geriatric company (see Yahoo). Facebook is eight. Talent is everything.

Internally, it doesn’t sound like Facebook employees are paying too much attention to the media fracas surrounding the IPO. It’s funny because the Hackathon leading into the IPO actually had a dual purpose. It wasn’t just to celebrate and maintain Facebook’s culture. One source told me it was to tire the employees out so much that they wouldn’t be able to pay attention to stock fluctuations the next morning. Good advice, indeed.

The images in this post are from CalmingManatee.com, because what is more calming than a manatee?

So now we’re in for an apparently unlimited amount of blaming Facebook for just about anything that needs a scapegoat. Take the story that crossed whatever we call the wires these days about how social readers are being destroyed by some tweaking of the Facebook engine. I followed all the links on Bruce Francis’ Cloudblog story and now realize this is actually about Facebook social readers. But the net seems to be: don’t trust your friends when they have something to share with you.

I thought this was already well known, starting and ending with Digg and its tyranny of the crowd. Trending topics for me is another way of saying here’s what to find out enough about to ignore everything else until something new happens. All you need to know about this is to see how many unfilled programming jobs there are out there that involve dedupping.

I’m not looking for a social reader in any case. What we really need is a social limiter, a version of the Beatles’ favorite studio tool, the Fairchild limiter. I once sequestered myself for months at the Band’s ShangriLa studio in Malibu, where the producer who ran the place had assembled as many Fairchilds as he could get his hands on. These babies were like some velvet glove you could wrap around guitars, vocals, even drum tracks — and out would come this warm glowing sound bursting with overtones, that felt better than what went in.

Translate that into a stream that discarded the latest rehash of a trending article, the latest numbers why RIM is screwed, why Facebook is the worst IPO in history. How about a size-shrinker that offers some visible clues as to the amount of actual information in the few truly interesting headline grabbers. How about some metrics on what actually is the amount of information we’re looking for per inch. The Fairchild limiter didn’t limit the music; it expanded its impact and clarity.

Social reader is really a misnomer, though. What’s social is the path travelled to the push notification that triggers your awareness of the next thing to absorb. And I’m the reader, not some app on Facebook or anywhere for that matter. More and more, I’m the detective, intuiting what I don’t see in the space between the lines, the posts, the tweets. Now that House is over, we only have his mantra to employ: the relentless odyssey in sea rch of completely irrelevant revenge for some dimly perceived slight that suddenly explodes in insight based on a random piece of dialogue. Remember: everybody lies.

Take Facebook. Supposedly the IPO was rigged to protect the house, as in every other form of legalized and otherwise gambling. The interior logic of the show was that because Facebook has 900 million subscribers, they by definition are inevitably going to be profitable, maybe more so than their competitors present and future. I actually feel that’s kind of right, but have much less clarity as to how I personally can profit by the insight. For example, if everybody who invests $1000 can flip it ten minutes later for $1100, at what point do you run out of suckers?

But just because the stock dove, then recovered, then dove, then barely got back to square one, doesn’t mean we don’t still have that same intuition. Waiting until Monday, Tuesday, even Wednesday and Thursday’s half bump, and Friday’s mini-dive, does nothing to change our minds about the big picture. 900 million, it’s like Sam’s Club, isn’t it? Who’s gonna do better anytime soon? So we didn’t do the flipitydip… it’ll just take longer. Meanwhile, the patient, this means us, is in a coma.

OK, let’s blame Scoble then. Doc Searls does a wonderful job of that in his new Techmemed post, but he somehow misses the point that Robert represents a fairly good bellweather of what actually is going to happen, namely that Facebook will succeed at whatever the hell it is experimenting with right now. Maybe the last minute warnings about mobile cluelessness are true, but I doubt it. My wife’s iPhone is off the hook with Facebook alerts from family, friends, and such. It’s not mobile they don’t get, it’s push.

That’s the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue.

This is why micro-communities like Path and FourSquare persist. Their signal to noise is scoped by the care with which we follow our peers and the precision of the resulting clarity of pushes. In a world of push, the most valuable signals are the ones that don’t interrupt, don’t repeat, don’t strangle the message in a sea of marketing. Push is about permission, which turns advertising into information on request and marketing into paid subscription.

Push requires a PLA, or Push Level Agreement, where we populate our social channels with enough signal from which to derive educated guesses about our intentions and intuitions. Yes, Facebook has plenty of data, but little understanding of how to leverage it because we’re not allowed to tune the inference algorithms. Metadata farming requires not just permission but incentives for broadcasting rich metadata and priority context.

This is why Google + Circles are so brain dead. Yes, they let you know who you are broadcasting to. But no, they don’t let us know who you’re broadcasting to. I can’t intuit the effect a post has on the implicit group, so I can’t tell how important it is to know about in the push queue. Since you’re not telling me how important you think this is, why should anybody else weight it? There’s little incentive to create those signals, and the end result of a push notification of a Google + item is to perceive it as an interruption.

Push is the cloud’s security blanket. It implicitly says, those who trust you will be trusted by you. Everybody else loses. Push capital punishment is to go to the Settings page and turn off an app. SocialCam may be the first if they don’t watch out. I like the early days feeling of the app, but I’m not sure the trust signals coming from its users are visible enough for me to understand. Photo apps are only push friendly to the extent that they don’t go viral, which seems contradictory unless you believe that push is the new money. I do.

As tempting as it might seem, please do not upload a picture of a bunch of cash and then upload it to a social network. That’s just dumb. But that’s also what one 17-year-old Australian girl did only to have two robbers armed with a knife and a club show up at her house.

The story goes that a 17-year-old girl was helping her grandma. Likely somewhere in between vacuuming and feather dusting, the two started counting money, and, as we all know, the elderly tend to keep a good sum of cash on hand. Apparently the 17-year-old snapped a picture of the pile which was likely fanned-out in the traditional gangster style. This girl then uploaded the picture to Facebook.

The picture of the undisclosed amount apparently attracted the attention of two robbers looking to make some quick cash. The two showed up at the girl’s house, however, the mother informed these men that the daughter no longer lived there. The two men searched the house anyway, leaving with what the BBC describes as “a small amount of cash and a small number of personal objects.” No-one was injured.

Let this be a lesson to everyone. There is such a thing as sharing too much. As tempting as it might be to show off your new BMW, flat screen TV, or even puppy, sharing this information on Facebook is essentially akin to posting the same information on your grocery store’s public bulletin board. But for the love of Mark Zuckerburg, do not share a picture of a pile of cash — especially if said pile isn’t even your money.

Here we go again: Facebook is apparently trying for the third time to get its phone project off the ground — snatching up iOS design and engineering talent left and right Nick Bilton is hearing.

We’re hearing (and seeing) similar regarding iOS talent, but with one caveat: Word on the street is that few mobile design whizzes actually want to work at Facebook, but everyone has their price, and post-IPO Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay that price, whatever it is.

Does Facebook need a phone? Whatever the answer to that question is, the more important item is that it THINKS it needs a phone, most likely because it’s still lacking a clear mobile strategy with regards to revenue.

The platform wars have created the following paradox; in order to compete with Facebook, Google attempts to build a social network, In order to compete with Google, Facebook attempts to build a phone — both diverging away from their core competency in their efforts. I’ve never tried to build a phone, so I’m not going to begrudge anyone their ambitions, but a majority of industry insiders I’ve spoken to today have been super skeptical about the viability of a Facebook phone, some even coming right out and saying, “It’ll be a miracle if this doesn’t suck.”

Making phone hardware is hard work, much harder than anything Facebook has ever attempted in the past. The company as we have seen thrives on an iterative culture of hackathons where projects are completed over night. A low margin/high volume business like phone hardware, as Bret Taylor’s mobile and platform team seems to be painfully and publicly learning, takes years to do correctly.

And there is a huge risk that they will fail again.

This kind of project, as others have speculated, requires the kind of execution Facebook isn’t known for, and the company will most likely have to work with a third-party in order to actually ship. Some have suggested that it buy a beleaguered hardware startup like RIM or a stalwart like HTC because the kind of long-term focus required here is just not endemic to Facebook company culture.

Basically, there are a million ways this project will fail, and just one way it will work: Facebook ostensibly could succeed by tapping into the opening in the mobile market where people want an alternative to poorly designed Android phones — targeting people who would buy something other than an iPhone if the price point was $150 less and the design were at least a little bit more ambitious than what is currently available on Android. Picture a Lumia that’s one big Facebook app if you need a visual.

It’ll be a miracle if Facebook manages to come up with a finished product that’s designed and priced for everyone, captures at least 15% of the smart phone market, and becomes a direct competitor to Google. But stranger things have happened.

A Facebook phone seems inevitable. Mobile advancements like Apple’s iMessage, iOS Twitter integration and whatever Google is doing with Google+ mean that its status as the predominant interpersonal communications platform is being threatened. But it won’t introduce a phone until it absolutely thinks it has to, so the question becomes “How soon until it (thinks it) has to?” And “Will it be ready?”

Wherever the Facebook Mobile team is tonight, they should take the Microsoft Kin’s failure as a cautionary tale: Stay away from poor device design and arcane social plugins and focus on your strengths, bringing mainstay apps like Instagram, Messenger, Camera, Events and Facebook Games front and center. And be a great phone first and foremost; the Facebook part should come second.

People don’t want to install and give data permissions to games, they want to play them, so now Facebook is allowing games to be played directly from within news feed or Timeline stories. These previews give gamers a taste and could get them over the install hurdle once they’re already addicted.

Facebook has to keep delivering growth for apps to get developers to stick around, or better yet, build for it first. Feed gaming could be a big selling point that could get devs to prioritize Facebook’s canvas over iOS, Android, Chrome web store, and other platforms that force people to download and install before the fun starts. Some of Facebook’s most popular games are already using this tactic, and you can try it out here for Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship.

Facebook tested feed gaming with Angry Birds earlier this month, but now any games can publish playable feed stories. They show up with a little play button over a thumbnail image in the feed or timeline, but instead of starting up a video, a flash embed of the game opens up. You can instantly start flinging birds, shooting bubbles, popping penguins or whatever. When the game round finishes, you’re often prompted to click through and install / give permissions to the full version.

You can try out feed gaming here for Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship.

This is going to work. The friction of having the decide whether a developer deserves your data can’t be understated. It probably drives away a ton of potential gamers. Even though most games are freemium and don’t cost anything to download, the try before you buy option means you don’t have to invest until you’re more sure you’ll actually enjoy a game.

Expect this to become a core part of the growth strategy for Facebook games. Developers will need to decide how to distill their games into a 30-second mini-experience. For some twitch games that will be easy, but for deeper strategy games it will be a challenge. They’ll also need to come up with hooks like “beat your friend’s high score” or “earn extra virtual goods by playing from the feed”.

I think people still feel guilty playing Facebook canvas games. These aren’t mobile where you can justify playing because you’re doing so on the move when you’re unable to be productive. These are web games that may be distracting you from your work, or at least communicating with your friends. When you click a link and the first thing you see is a permissions prompt, that guilt is triggered, and you shy away instead of installing.

By delaying the guilt trip data permission until after you’re already having fun, you’re much more likely to speed through the install process to get your next gaming fix. Even the most studious, serious, buttoned down business men are now going to try Facebook games, and some will end up installing and paying.

Not everyone loves Facebook enough to give it three, four, or five spots on their homescreen. So yesterday’s launch of Facebook’s third consumer iOS app Facebook Camera could actually end up reducing usage of Facebook’s main app, Messenger, and others by compelling people to consolidate them into a folder. Facebook Camera has shot to the top of the iOS free charts, so lots of people are making the decision of where to put it right now.

This issue isn’t one just for Facebook but for any developer looking to break out specific features of a cluttered omni-app into streamlined standalone apps. Is a lightweight feel worth the risk of app overload?

Facebook’s attempt to cram its entire full-featured web-based social network into a single mobile app hasn’t quite worked out. Many people complain the app feels slow and requires too many clicks to get to core services. Honestly, I think the click friction concerns are blown out of proportion. It takes one click to start uploading a photo and two to reach your messages. It is slow, though, as it has to load a ton of extra features you don’t always use.

Standalone apps don’t have to load anything unnecessary, so at first it makes sense that Facebook would release Messenger and now Camera, its new Instagram-style photo filtering and sharing app.

But where are you going to put them? If you’re not willing to give Facebook three home screen spots, some of them are going to get relegated to your back pages. There could be another terrible fate in store for the apps, though. You might drag their icons on top of each other and create a Facebook app folder.

Suddenly it takes an extra click to get to any of them. Without that big blue F icon reminding me to check my news feed and notifications, I could become a lot less likely to open my main Facebook app so often.

Facebook for iOS app had around 57.5 million daily users growing at 2.5 million per month when Facebook stopped reporting these numbers at the start of 2012, at that rate it would have around 70 million DAU now. Being banished to a folder could stunt this growth.

And what if Facebook doesn’t stop? What if it releases another standalone app for accessing third-party apps on its mobile platform? Or apps for Events or its location service Places? Not to mention Facebook Camera is already competing with Instagram which Facebook has acquired (though the deal still has to close), and it recently launched a separate app for admins to manage their Pages. They could all get buried in the folder too.

[Update: Some like Google's director of product management Hunter Walk think opening a folder and then a standalone app might still be easier than digging through a clutter omni-app for certain features. But there's still the problem of Apple's questionably designed folders. With no featured image, just a grid of teeny tiny icons within the icon, they don't really sing "click me" the way a full-size app icon does. I once put all my photo and camera apps in a folder and found myself clicking on all of them less. People navigate their iPhones visually, and folders don't have the same visual prominence.]

Facebook is reaching standalone app overload — a growing pain of the move to mobile, a medium it wasn’t originally built for. The root of the problem is the sluggish main app. Facebook can’t keep cutting off limbs to make it more lightweight, and it can’t just trim the fat of lesser-used features. It needs to convert fat to muscle so its main app stays the same size, but feels better, faster, stronger.

Check out our review of Facebook Camera to see how it stacks up against Instagram

It has been a week since the Facebook IPO, with a whole lot of drama in the aftermath about the glitch with Nasdaq (and the legal implications), and questions about how much traders have lost as a result, while the share price has fallen: from a start of $38 it is now $32.79 in pre-market trading. But in a speech earlier this week to the 2012 graduating class of Harvard Business School, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg steered very clear of these topics.

Instead, as you can see in the video we have embedded below, we got a pretty good (and in my opinion pretty inspiring) speech: quite a few Facebook references but not directly about the business itself, and a lot of talk about remaining honest, and the role of women at the highest level of business.

Sandberg, who was at HBS 17 years ago, joked about how at Facebook she gets asked for feedback when developers need the opinion of an older person for a new feature:

“When Dean Nohria asked me to speak here today, I thought, come talk to a group of people way younger and cooler than I am? I can do that, I do that every day, I like being surrounded by young people except when they say to me, ‘What was it like being in college without the internet?’ Or worse, ‘Sheryl, can you come here? We need to see what old people think of this feature.’”

Knowing how users react to Facebook’s product changes is crucial to the site making the right moves, so today it closed an acq-hire of part of design research firm Bolt | Peters — specifically its leading man CEO Nate Bolt and several other employees from the six person consultancy. Those coming over will be joining Facebook’s design team that’s headed by Kate Aronowitz.

Bolt | Peters started 10 years ago and specialized in recruiting actual visitors to a website through its tool Ethnio and then observing their usage remotely so it could deliver insights on what to improve to their clients, which numbered over 90. Bolt | Peters will shut down on June 22nd, and has already spun out its Ethnio real-time research service.

Facebook tests product changes more frequently than nearly any service. Bringing in Nate Bolt and some of his teammates will help it understand exactly how users feel about changes and avoid blunders like Beacon.

Right now, Facebook typically pushes design changes to a tiny fraction of its user base through its Gatekeeper system. It then watches the usage data to see if users engage with new features or changes, and how engagement, sharing, and time-on-site change. Changes that improve these metrics often get pushed to the whole user base. Innovating and iterating in a way that pushes people’s boundaries is good, but Facebook needs to be careful not to roll out new features too far before its users are ready for the future.

Bolt | Peters will give Facebook talent with experience deducing both the sentimental reactions and actual impact on usage of its changes. That’s important because sometimes users hate things at first, like the news feed, but use them a ton and end up loving them. It had previously assisted Sony, HP, Electronic Arts, Volkswagen, Autodesk, AAA, Genentech, Esurance, the Washington Post, and more with its services including live remote research, mobile research, training, live recruiting, game research, and “UX blitz”.

You can learn more about Nate Bolt at his About.me, or in this interview with Use.this

Here’s the full announcement of the acq-hire from Bolt | Peters’ blog:

It turns out the Facebook design team is a great place for smart researchers. For more than ten years, Bolt | Peters has worked with our clients (plus a robot and clay dinosaurs) to improve the design of their sites, apps, devices, video games, and cars. We did that with 238 projects, 24 talks, 18 articles, 11 events, 1 book, 19 weird videos, and 1 app. But the time has come for our next adventure — at Facebook. Bolt | Peters will be closing operations on June 22nd, 2012. While we’ll miss working with our amazing clients, we’re stoked about Facebook’s commitment to user experience, and the design team is a critical part of this.

What about ethnio? Last week we announced that after five years of growth, ethnio deserved to be its own company. That has not changed. Ethnio remains committed to supporting its customers with real-time research recruiting and more. We know Ethnio is in good hands with some of the people who have worked on it for years at the helm. I will no longer be working there, but will retain ownership. You can find out more about the new team at ethnio and who will be running it by following @ethnio or watching their blog.

User Research Friday and 1197 I’m thrilled to say that our friends at User Interface Engineering will be taking over User Research Friday. They pretty much rule at events. URF lives on. And the fine folks at the New York Soho Gallery for Digital Art will be taking over our mobile photography conference, 1197. Basically, both our product and the events that we’ve enjoyed putting on will live on after Bolt | Peters closes up shop. Feel free to get in touch with us with any questions, and you can keep up with all of us individually here. Our VP, Cyd Harrell, deserves 100% of the credit for running the consulting side of the business for the past six years. She rules. Thank you, Cyd. And a huge thanks to my co-founder Craig Peters, who has been a friend and advisor for years. But especially, all the team at Bolt | Peters past and present that I’ve had the pleasure of working with – you’ve made our success possible. Thank you guys.

Well. It’s been our privilege to be a part of the the interaction design and UX community as a consulting firm since January, 2002, and we plan to continue to work in that community as part of Facebook. I want to mention that this decision did not come lightly. Our clients, colleagues, team, and advisors are simply the best. They are our partners. They are our friends. And we sincerely thank you. – Nate Bolt

This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, our own Josh Constine sat down with David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” to discuss what they thought about the future of the newly IPO’ed social network. Specifically, the two focused on the potential for Facebook’s advertising platform, its competitive advantages over incumbents and competitors, and its potential acquisition targets which could help its platform expand.

What’s Facebook’s Post-IPO Strategy?

Josh started off by asking Kirkpatrick what he thought was the most important thing Facebook should do going forward. David responded that Facebook shouldn’t do anything differently, even going so far as to say that doing so would be the “most perilous mistake they could make.” However, in terms of how the IPO could potentially affect the company’s focus, and specifically CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on product, was the fact that Zuckerberg now has to “sell a lot of ads.”

As a public company, analysts will be making quarterly earnings projections, and Zuckerberg will have to waste a lot of time thinking about that, said Kirkpatrick. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not, he will have to think about money now, Kirkpatrick lamented, a role that the CEO had historically dedicated to COO Sheryl Sandberg. However, Josh pointed out that shift may not be a bad thing — Zuckerberg hasn’t “applied his big brain to monetization yet,” he noted.

Facebook’s Uber-Precise Ad Targeting

The two then moved onto sharing their thoughts about the Facebook advertising platform, which had Josh asking what Kirkpatrick thought Facebook had done that was really special in ads. Responded the author, “to create an environment which can be so accurately targeted for advertising is an innovation in itself.”

He added that it’s also effectively an unmonetized innovation at this time, and he’s confident that there’s a lot of revenue opportunity there in the future, too. Kirkpatrick said that he felt that even something as simple as putting an ad in your News Feed was an innovation.

How Facebook Will Get To Be Worth More Than $100B

In discussing new monetization streams for the network, the potential for an offsite ad network that could one day rival Google’s AdSense was huge. There are already 9 million businesses and advertisers on the Facebook ad platform today, said Kirkpatrick. But highly targeted ads – the kind you would see on Facebook itself – could potentially freak people out when they showed up on the wider Internet, Josh pointed out.

Kirkpatrick agreed to a point, but said that most people, including the average Facebook user, don’t seem to really care. There’s a tidal wave of “anti-targeting mindset,” especially in Europe, said Kirkpatrick, but it seemed to be mostly among the press, the government, and the “influentials” (which he dubbed the “punditocracy”). “A lot don’t understand Facebook or advertising that well,” he said of this group, painting them with a rather large brush. Kirkpatrick also said that not only does the average Facebook user not care about ads, in some of Facebook’s largest markets, it’s not a concern at all. Indonesia, for example – Facebook’s fourth largest country –  has no issue with Facebook’s advertising.

Who Should Facebook Buy

Finally, in terms of what companies Facebook should acquire next, both agreed that moving into physical payments would make sense for the company.

As for the recent Instagram and Karma acquisitions, Kirkpatrick called them “unexpected and surprising,” saying that they’re really app related, which he thought was odd. “What’s really important for Facebook is being a platform,” he said. He thought the biggest investments would be to “augment their platform capabilities, not their app capabilities.” But he concluded that some things, like photos, may be so important to the platform that they felt they needed to spend a billion dollars on it.

“Tumblr is an interesting company for Facebook to think about,” Kirkpatrick stated. He also thought that Facebook couldn’t help but be obsessing over Pinterest right now, but Josh vehemently disagreed. Instead, Josh’s picks were some sort of peer-to-peer payments company like Venmo, and an offsite ad network technology that would give Facebook the ability to scrape data from websites outside its walled garden to let Facebook serve relevant ads to visitors who aren’t logged in.

Well, well, well. As if you couldn’t get your fix of sling-shotting irascible fowl on every other mobile and social platform known to man, Rovio announced this morning that Angry Birds for Facebook (officially known as Angry Birds Friends) has finally done flown the coop and left the warm nest of its beta. Avian double-speak aside, what does that mean exactly?

It means that, having gone through the requisite user testing, tweaking, and multi-billion-dollar IPO-ing, Rovio’s Facebook app — with a handful of new features in tow — is finally ready for public consumption. As to those features, Angry Birds Friends brings a number of trendy social gaming features to Angry Birds, including tournament mode, new weekly levels, new ways to earn power-ups, rewards, and, of course, tons of social integration.

As Angry Birds fanatics are well aware, Rovio launched Angry Birds Friends in beta earlier this year. On top of those things I mentioned earlier, the beta version of Angry Birds Friends has also been a testing ground for Rovio to test out new business models, like offering $1 power-ups beyond pay-to-download options or the infamous Mighty Eagle.

The game’s port to Facebook likely had the social network excited, considering that Angry Birds has been a presence on Google+ and other Google products for awhile now — not to mention the fact that massively popular games like Angry Birds could mean good things for Facebook’s revenue.

But, as to Angry Birds Friends’ (what an awkward and clunky name to say aloud, by the way) new features, they’re pretty much self-explanatory, but its new tournaments feature allows users to compete with their friends on four different levels — from Monday to Sunday. The pig-popping user with the highest overall score earns a gold trophy, with silver going to second, etc, etc. And, thankfully, unlike crowns, users get to keep their trophies forever. For. Ever.

The “New Weekly Levels” refer, specifically, to those four new levels being offered in tournament mode, although Rovio hinted that it will be launching further levels every week. Third of all, there are those power-ups, which, on top of the daily rewards users can already collect, users can now earn power-ups in tournament mode. Earn three power-up bundles and you’ll receive a shiny gold trophy.

As for context, in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, Angry Birds is popular. More than five people use it. In fact, earlier this month Rovio announced that its coven of Angry Birds apps had amassed 1 billion downloads. To date, Rovio has released the original, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, newer arrival Angry Birds Space, and now, what one might consider its newest arrival, Angry Birds Friends.

If you’d asked me two years ago if Angry Birds merchandising would be extremely popular, and that an Angry Birds movie would be in the works, I would have laughed at you. But, considering I’m wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt right now, eating Angry Birds cereal, and that Rovio’s 2011 earnings were about 10-times its estimated revenues from the year prior, with 30 percent coming from merchandising, well clearly I didn’t get the last laugh.

More on Angry Birds Friends in Rovio’s blog post here.

Updating in realtime

One of the hottest trends in gaming right now isn’t mobile, social, or massively multiplayer games, but online casinos. This may seem somewhat surprising considering that it was only a year ago that the Justice Department seized the domain names of some of the country’s largest online poker platforms, like PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, UB.com, and Absolute Poker, charging their founders with bank fraud, money laundering, illegal gambling, among other offenses. And five years prior, the Unlawful Gambling Act effectively putting a stop to online gambling in the U.S. and sending the market into a tailspin.

However, in December, the Justice Department reversed its stance on many forms of online gambling, paving the way for what is becoming a revitalization of the social gambling market. Naturally, with activity in the space increasing, a number of startups have popped up to take advantage, like the rebranded Titan Gaming, for example.

Today brings another entrant into the social gambling space with RocketFrog, which is setting out to bring casino entertainment to Facebook with the launch of a free-to-play online casino that offers players the chance to win real prizes. Traditionally, online casino players participate in the casino gaming experience recreationally, with the rewards being the opportunity to socialize with friends or earn a few virtual badges.

So, RocketFrog wants to change this by leveraging the Facebook platform — where all of your friends are already — to create social tournaments, where players can interact and compete against their friends to win real prizes, not just accumulate points on leaderboards or vie for status increases.

Each day, the startup will run poker, blackjack, and slot tournaments in small-ish fields of 80 to 300 players, with levels lasting two to five minutes. In a somewhat unusual business model, RocketFrog plans to recruit a different advertiser each day to sponsor a variety of prizes, including movie tickets, music, and good, with prizes obviously being related to whatever company happens to be paying for the ads. If it’s Pizza Hut, prizes will likely include coupons, meal offers, and probably some free pepperoni.

The platform intends to accomodate gamers of all abilities, so that if a user is new to a game, for example, they can peruse through the startup’s suite of learning tutorials, game strategy articles, and expert tips. Its games also allow players to choose their stakes and limits in an effort to customize the overall gaming experience, while challenging friends, tracking their bank roll, sharing achievements, earning loyalty rewards, and comparing game stats and rankings.

RocketFrog was founded in 2010 by Brett Calapp, Matthew Osborn, and Uri Kozai. Calapp is the former CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, a subscription-based gaming network that sold to PartyGaming in 2010.

The startup’s leadership, along with the potential market opportunity, has attracted a familiar face in social networking. Tom Anderson, also known as the co-founder and former president of Myspace, has joined RocketFrog’s advisory board alongside reality TV star and celebrity poker player Brody Jenner.

When asked what he sees as RocketFrog’s core value proposition, the former Myspace president said that few have “really pushed incentive-based gaming on the Facebook platform.” It’s as simple as the fact that millions of people play online poker for free, he says, so if they’re given an engaging platform and gaming experience, why wouldn’t they want to play for realworld prizes? What’s more, “RocketFrog is also giving advertisers what they always want but can’t seem to get — an immersive and deep experience that actually features their brand — banners alone aren’t enough.”

CEO Brett Calapp says that, while legislation and regulations will take time to iron themselves out (legislation may not be put in place until next year, or 2014) and casino platforms are popping up by the minute, RocketFrog’s core strategy is to avoid making players feel inferior about their bankroll in order to drive sales of virtual currency, but instead to reward its players by offering them the ability to compete in tournaments for quality, realworld prizes.

Rather than relying on a small, obsessive segment of addicted players, Calapp says that RocketFrog wants to expand its community to include new players, those not typically classified as gamblers, but who don’t want to just play for meaningless virtual rewards.

RocketFrog has a steep uphill climb to track down the bigs in the space, like DoubleDown Casinos and Zynga’s Texas Hold ‘em, but with some influential advisors and a mission to bring social, tournament-style gamble-gaming to the masses, the startup may just be onto something.

For more, check out RocketFrog at home here.

You’re crazy with your friends, serious with your co-workers, and sweet with your parents. Now you can share those distinct personalities with their matching audiences thanks to Hmmm, a mobile app launching today that aims to let you be yourself online, whoever that is.

Facebook friend lists and Google Circles have proven too clumsy for selective sharing. They’ve led to the rise of Path, which eliminates the decision making by creating a social micronetwork of your closest friends, but all your favorite people aren’t there, and not every post is appropriate for everyone you love. Hmmm lets you create separate avatars for each of your identities, and publish to pre-made sets of Hmmm and Facebook friends. Plus, Hmmm will soon be able to notify a friend that says they’re bored when you post that you want to see a movie.

Sol Studios just launched Hmmm at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, with an iOS app available now and an Android version coming in two weeks.

Hmmm’s co-founder Archana Patchirajan tells me “I’m a daughter, I’m a student, I’m a co-founder. We all have nicknames and social groups. It’s unrealistic to have one profile. We wanted to give users a flexible platform to express themselves the way the do in real life.”

Hmmm doesn’t just structure who you share to, but what you share as well. There’s categories like activities, emotions, places, music, and photos, but also tags like “happy” or “inspired” for emotions, or “working” or “celebrating” for activities. The next version of Hmmm will include its “inference engine” that can match people with complementary posts. Like two people who are shopping nearby each other, or someone doing something exciting with someone bored.

You can also use Hmmm as a layer on top of Facebook. The app creates feeds of posts by Facebook and Hmmm friends of your avatars. You can like and comment from within Hmmm and that feedback will appear back on Facebook.

The bootstrapped Sol Studios plans to monetize Hmmm with Sponsored Stories-style social ads, where small businesses, record companies, and consumer packaged goods companies pay to increase the presence of posts that mention them. It originally considered sponsored gamification, but I persuaded the team that would clutter the app and make it confusing, so they stripped it out.

In the Disrupt Battlefield Q&A, Patchirajan explained that Hmmm won’t limit the number of connections you can have, the way Path caps you at 150. She said Hmmm would succeed because competitors’ approaches to micro-sharing are “very unnatural. Finally, she explained the confusing name of her product as…the sound you make when you’re confused who to say something with.

Hmmm’s biggest challenge will be convincing users to endure the friction of choosing an audience, content type, and sub-tags just to publish something to friends. Path’s near decision-less publishing is a pleasure and I fear Hmmm could be a pain. But those who want to share their split-personality but are serious about privacy should give Hmmm some thought.

Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook.

While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360, a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties

As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy.

Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall.

For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example.

To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages.

The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties.

For more, check out Wishpond at home here, Mall360 here, or see the video below:

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn’t been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+” says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. [Update: To clarify, I believe Google missed the boat on buying Twitter, while Wilson simply said Google wasn't interested in such a purchase since it committed to Google+. Wilson did not make a value judgement on Google not buying Twitter, nor did he confirm that acquisition discussions ever took place.]

Now Google+ is widely seen as a ghost town, and not buying Twitter could be a mistake that haunts Mountain View for years to come. Wilson has one of the most envied portfolios in venture capital, with Union Square Ventures getting in early on Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Tumblr. But the future might not be as bright. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at investing in the next big thing. I don’t come from it. I didn’t work in it. The next thing isn’t going to be evolutionary. It’s going to be something completely different.”

Arrington poked Wilson about writing “Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit” in a recent AVC blog post. Wilson explains “I didn’t mean to say [that]. Silicon Valley is the center of the digital revolution. But if there’s another revolution, [like] the teleportation revolution, and teleportation is invented in Mumbai, Silicon Valley might not be the locus of the next big thing.”

Google Lost The Flock

On the war for the future of social, Arrington asked “Do you think Facebook is overvalued?” Despite the newly public company’s share price dropping over 10% from its Friday close price, Wilson defend Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. “Markets come and go, good companies survive. The price of Facebook stock is not that important. Mark built an incredible platform and organization. I don’t think it matters that much if it’s trading at $25 or $50.” But Arrington pressed “is it going to be a half-trillion dollar company?” Wilson admitted “They’re going to have to grow into that.”

Google had a big opportunity to compete with Facebook, but that’s passed. Arrington cites a rumor that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the company to Google saying it was raising this big a round at this valuation, and gave the search giant a chance to acquire Twitter, but  ”Google pooh-poohed it”. After the chat, Arrington told me this was when Twitter ended up raising $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, so the price Google would have had to pay could have been around there.

Wilson, who’s Twitter investment and former board seat must have made him familiar with the discussion, said Google decided to build social, and hasn’t considered buying something as big as Twitter in the space ever since. [Update: Wilson never confirmed Arrington's rumor, nor did he imply that not purchasing Twitter was the wrong move for Google] Google+ is off to a slow start, at least in terms of people actually using it, not just signing up. But Twitter might not have been the right fit. Google needed a social layer that could integrate into all its product, not just a micro-blogging platform. Still, Google is now a distant third in social, and Twitter’s off the table. Wilson says Twitter’s founders and board are now deadset on it staying independent.

Update: Google better hope it doesn’t end up like Yahoo, who famously reduced its bid to buy Facebook in 2006 and then lost the deal. Now Wilson says Yahoo’s former chief, the disgraced Scott Thompson “was a terrible CEO. The first thing he did was sue Facebook as a patent troll, proving he’s clueless about the way the world works. He was one of a terrible string of CEOs for that company.” There’s still a chance for Thompson to redeem himself, though. “Elliot Spitzer recovered” says Wilson, “I think people can rehabilitate themselves, but it’s definitely not a good thing to be lying on your resume.”

What’s The Value Of Angels?

“I’ve never seen angels being lazy” says Wilson , refuting Ben Horowitz’s claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wilson released a flood of insights into Facebook’s valuation, and the future of Silicon Valley

“Venture capital is not the most risk-taking part of the equation. We wait until things are more developed” says Wilson. He trusts angels and the early legwork and diligence they do. “I don’t know where ‘lazy’ comes from. They’re probably the most important part of the capital stack because they believe in entrepreneurs before VCs do.”

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

Facebook shares dropped nearly 12 percent to $33.76 — below the company’s final $38 price in the company’s highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Facebook’s worth because the company’s shares will no longer be supported as heavily by the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.

Facebook’s performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Facebook shares didn’t close below their opening price. There were also irregularities in trading on NASDAQ as some buyers had to wait hours to know whether their orders had been filled. The company’s market cap is now around $92.7 billion, down from the $104 billion valuation the company opened with last week.

That said, the real test will be over the long haul. Can Facebook prove its worth over the many years to come with more display ad and payments revenue? At Friday’s closing market cap of $104.8 billion, Facebook is worth more than one hundred times last year’s net income. Plus its revenue dipped quarter-over-quarter for the first time in the beginning of this year.

Over the weekend, there was a raging debate about whether the banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO pushed the offer price too high to $38. The financial press including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg (and yes, even some earlier reporting from me on TechCrunch) focused on the fact that Morgan Stanley had to support Facebook’s shares above the $38 line.

Fortune’s Dan Primack and others VC’s like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the guest post on TechCrunch this morning from Trinity’s Dan Scholnick argue that the IPO went off fantastically well for Facebook. Because shares didn’t pop dramatically higher than the $38 offer price, it’s a sign that the company got the most capital it could out of the IPO and didn’t leave any money on the table. They also savvily negotiated the underwriters’ fees down to about 1 percent.

These are all essentially shades of gray. Facebook’s performance today will be fascinating to watch. But again, it’s just one day in the long life of a company. It’s up to Facebook to show that it is worth a lot more.

That’s a sentiment that was echoed by Union Square Ventures’ managing partner Fred Wilson this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. He said, “The price of Facebook isn’t that important. Mark built an incredible organization. I don’t care whether it’s trading at $25 or 35.”

Facebook’s performance is probably affecting tech stocks across the board. This morning, Zynga’s shares are off 7 percent to $6.65 and LinkedIn is down 6.4 percent to $92.65.

With a wedding ring on his finger and his company public, is Mark Zuckerberg ready to make Facebook produce more profits, not just more social connections?

His fanfare-less marriage to long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan this weekend would seem to indicate he won’t be getting too distracted by family life. But just before Facebook IPO’d on Friday, he announced on stage that “Our mission isn’t to be a public company.”

As the young CEO enters this next phase of his life, he faces perhaps his greatest challenge yet: building something that betters our lives while still bringing home the bacon.

The business of social networking has never been Zuckerberg’s strongest suit. In fact, beyond his backyard wedding ceremony and a town hall discussion with President Barack Obama, you’re unlikely to see the CEO in a suit. That’s partly why one of his smartest moves was bringing on Google biz wiz Sheryl Sandberg as his COO.

But no one understands the future of social quite like Zuckerberg. His uncanny ability to figure out what we want from Facebook before we do has spawned the news feed and other features critical to the site’s enduring success. What Facebook the public company needs now is for Zuckerberg to aim that foresight toward making money.

Honestly, that’s the saddest part of Facebook’s IPO — that such a pioneer of human connection would have to fracture his attention to pore over profit-loss statements.

This is the man who brought us ambient intimacy, the feeling of being closer to everyone we know thanks to indirect communication. Facebook and its promising new auto-translation features, is fostering friendships between countries with deep cultural divides. These are the kinds of things the world needs Mark Zuckerberg working on.

But now Facebook has shareholders it’s responsible to. They’ll want him looking for aggressive new ways to monetize that come to fruition fast. Don’t expect Zuckerberg to strangle users with ads, though.

With any luck, you’ll hardly be able to tell what he’s up to when it comes to increasing revenue. It will be a natural side effect of how Facebook works. Such as that all those news stories, songs, and videos you auto-share to the news feed aren’t just content to show your friends. They’re going to power ad targeting based on what you do, not just what you Like.

Mark and Priscilla have just forged one of the strongest connections of all (congratulations, seriously). They’re starting the Zuckerberg family, a lifelong journey.

And the journey to Facebook’s earnings growing to reflect its valuation will be a long one too. It will take the visionary’s focus, but investors, press, employees, and the rest should be patient. Just because you don’t see the future of Facebook’s business right now doesn’t mean it hasn’t been dreamed up. This is Mr. Zuckerberg we’re talking about, after all.

[Image Credit: AP Photo]

Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

Congratulations to Facebook for going public. Congratulations to the employees that are now millionaires. Congratulations to the founders who are now billionaires. Congratulations to the bankers, lawyers and investors who have added to their already considerable wealth. You’ve grasped the brass ring we’re all reaching for.

Yet the company that’s been created isn’t what I want from Silicon Valley.

Let’s lay aside for a minute the foibles of the founders: Mark Zuckerberg’s hacking Harvard’s servers and the email accounts of journalists, his decision to “fuck” the Winklevii “in the ear” and Eduardo Saverin’s ridiculous tax dodge. Let’s forget about the Facebook Beacon “mistake” or the comment censorship thing. Let’s forget about the privacy implications. Just take anything that makes you queasy about the company and put it in a box for one minute to consider Facebook objectively.

Facebook sells advertising—it may be the most effective advertising platform since Google, or not—but that’s not the best use of the brightest minds of our generation. Advertising doesn’t improve our balance of trade. It doesn’t lift people out of poverty. It doesn’t employ the modestly skilled. It doesn’t extend life expectancies or take away pain. It doesn’t improve our standard of living.

Silicon Valley is at its best when it uses its unique combination of talent and capital to advance society, to create even better tools for creation, to unlock the potential of people not just here, but across the globe.

Where Facebook Falls Short

There’s an old gambling saying that if you don’t know who is the sucker at the table, it’s you. The same might be said of online businesses these days: if you don’t know what’s been sold, it’s you. Facebook sells your content, your connections, your time, your attention, your personal information to advertisers. The company is only a conduit for what you do. Its value, set by the market on Thursday, is a reflection of the worth of what you’ve contributed and created.

Yes, each time you sign in to Facebook, you’re going to work for Mark Zuckerberg. Each time you update your status, post a video, check in or just sit and watch everybody else do it, you line his pockets.

And I wouldn’t mind that a bit. In fact, I would applaud it, were the product of these hours more profitable.

The fact is that much of the time spent on Facebook is wasted. The company says in its S-1 that users spent an average of 175 million hours per day on Facebook in February 2012. That’s a lot. Compare that to say, the 100 million hours Clay Shirky and a researcher at IBM calculate it took to create all of Wikipedia.

What’s Wikipedia worth? I think it’s priceless, but back in 2008, Business Insider estimated that if it were to become a commercial enterprise, Wikipedia would be worth $7 billion. Say it’s just half that—adjust for the Henry Blodget factor—and you’d see that the value of contributions to Facebook, were they as valuable as the time spent contributing to Wikipedia, ought to be worth $6.125 billion per day.

But it’s not. Contributing to Wikipedia increases the availability of the world’s knowledge. “Liking” Starbucks contributes only to the knowledge advertisers can use to better target you.

It’s much better to watch television. Television, like Facebook, gets paid by advertisers for your time.When advertisers pay TV channels, the money flows to many different pockets. There’s the TV stars, of course, but there’s also the crew: the craft-services, the set designers, the costumers, the line producers, the sound engineers, electricians, gaffers, writers and key grips. All the people who make the TV show get a slice of that advertising dollar and these are good jobs, many unionized, that don’t require a fancy Stanford computer science degree. And each person employed making TV shows pays taxes and pumps their salaries back into the economy.

And the product of their work can be exported. When the U.S. sells movies and TV shows abroad it improves our balance of trade and helps make the products we import, such as iPads and oil, less expensive.

When advertisers pay Facebook, the money goes into the pockets of Facebook shareholders, employees and computer makers. Most of Facebook’s stock is held by a single person and only a small, select group of highly skilled programmers can secure a spot on the payroll. The wealth created by Facebook gets concentrated into the hands of a few—some of whom have refused to pay taxes on their gains—instead of being recycled into the greater economy. And the computer makers that supply Facebook rely on components imported from other countries, sending capital abroad and weakening our balance of trade.

Facebook’s rise is great for Zuck, but unless you’re among a privileged few, it isn’t good for you.

There’s one other important difference between television and Facebook. Great television approaches art. I’ll remember the drama of The Sopranos and the laughs from 30 Rock long after I’m done looking at those pictures of your niece’s baby.

We Can Do Better

The Facebook fans are quick to defend the company’s value. It empowers connection! It brings people closer to each other! You can’t put a price on that! It helped organize the Arab Spring, for goodness sake.

Facebook enhances loose connections and keeps you in contact with the people you wouldn’t invest the time to call or write an email to. Seeing pictures of a friend’s ultrasound may be priceless, but the value comes from you, your connection to the friend and the miracle of life, not the service that delivers the image. Facebook did help people organize in advance of the Arab Spring, but so did Twitter, email, SMS and many other vectors. And there certainly were revolutions before Facebook and will likely be revolutions long after Facebook powers down its last server.

Facebook isn’t bad. It is just a low-value use of time that doesn’t contribute much to the economy beyond enriching the rich. What more valuable things could be done with the time, energy, effort, creativity and capital invested in its making and daily usage?

There are startups doing amazing things here in Silicon Valley still. Sure there are the electric cars, robot butlers, space rockets and a bunch of hyper-ambitious projects. But you can have a positive contribution to the economy and the world without curing cancer or feeding starving people in Africa (there is a venture firm in San Francisco working on sustainable agriculture if you do want to make a difference in the subcontinent). I’m often impressed by people working to prevent outbreaks of nasty viruses with rapid vaccination development or others creating systems to radically improve the energy efficiency of large buildings. These companies’ goals are obtainable, their achievement would be beneficial and the products would be the world’s envy.

With Facebook public, perhaps the past half-decade of social networking, casual games, virtual worlds, MMORPGs, app stores, avatars and “pokes” will give way to a renaissance of startup companies that make real products of tangible value that employ regular people. Such a return to Silicon Valley’s roots could reinvigorate the American economy and once again put this unique place at the heart of human progress.