don't buy facebook

because everyone else is writing about it, i'll throw in my two cents.

first of all, don't buy facebook.

i know it's a limited controlled IPO with carefully dosed out quantities and us mere mortals have no access to said magical shares, it's still a bad idea to buy facebook stocks now.

why not?

i've been following the social media "explosion" for the last couple of years, and i've seen numbers about the growth of mobile devices vs. radio and tv, seen statistics about how if facebook were a country it would be the third biggest country in the world. i've seen how there are a billion tweets a week and how many people have followers. but the question is this:

who gives a fuck?

in case it wasn't clear, facebook isn't a country. not even as a metaphor. comparing it to a country is like saying if my car were an eagle it would have eggs the size of large dogs. that makes absolutely no sense. all the other numbers about social media out there are out there for us to ogle at them, but they really lack meaning. we have social media experts and certified consultants and analysts. we have this wave of change that everyone is speculating about, but the fact is this: they're all fucking clueless. facebook's 900 million members are tantalizing for their size and the info the share, but not because it makes a lot of money. in fact, facebook made around $4 billion in 2011, yet was valued at $100 billion. why? for the promise of making money from those users.

social media is a trend that's in flux and people still can't figure it out. think of the internet in the late nineties. speculators were betting that this new wonderful tech that's changing the world is worth far, far more than it really was. was it new? yes. was it wonderful? yes. did it see phenomenal growth? yes. did it change the world? absolutely. was it worth the money. nope. social media is in this state. think yahoo, hotmail, myspace, flickr... all past their prime and basking in their former glory.

so my projection is this: facebook has more or less hit its peak i think zuckerburg should've IPOed 2 years ago. i'm not saying it'll fade away, i'm saying it'll turn into something like email - everyone has it, most users use it, yet nothing exciting happens there. people will use it to share pictures and comment on them and all that, but it'll fade into a commodity that was once exciting.