Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
Get the maybe-latest here. There's speculation on timetables which really says very little.
I still want to keep this in people's minds because how the IPO goes is going to effect other IPOs, market valuations, VC investments and more. This may not be a good effect, but it will be a effect.
Quick; I want you to imagine the makers of smart phone or console that refused to have Netflix on it. Wait, or maybe they decide they don't want any Facebook technology on it. Or maybe, just maybe they don't want anything to do with that whole "Twitter thing."
Can you see it? Nope, neither can I. And why can't I see it? Because Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other companies have made themselves more or less indispensable to large customer bases. They're not going anywhere, they've learned from the mistakes of their predecessors (such as Facebook learned from MySpace and Netflix learn from,well, everybody), understand that they can make up the infrastructure of people's lives.
Facebook has been in the news with it's recent announcements, changes, and of course, new features. Over and over again I hear the same arguments about Facebook – lack of privacy, settings too obscure or complex, everything changes so much. Facebook is this giant morphing ball of "stuff" that everyone likes and no one is happy with.
I'd like to focus on the complexity issues with Facebook, the arguments that its too hard to change settings and that when you dig into it, Facebook can actually be quite complex.
The complexity isn't a surprise to me, but I think it surprises many people. The reason it surprises them is that they're treating Facebook like a web page or web tool, like a Google search or a Twitter feed. Facebook is not a simple web page/tool.
Facebook is a web-delivered application (bordering in some cases on being an operating system as well).