More Facebook coverage

These are the days that Silicon Valley lives for.

Facebook's initial public stock sale Friday brought with it the kind of anticipation reserved for Christmas, New Year's, Diwali, Tet, Fiestas Patrias and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. But remember that Christmas Eve when you lay awake all night picturing your brilliant new 10-speed bike under the tree? And how the next day you discovered that Santa had left a set of encyclopedias where your bike was supposed to be?

Yeah, that.

But you know what? We'll take it. We'll take another lukewarm IPO and the jokes about Faceplant, Saveface and the like. We'll take it because the Facebook IPO, regardless of the stock's closing price, was a doozy. Early in the day, the man of the hour (and one-time Time man of the year) rang the Nasdaq's opening bell, and the era of Facebook as a public company began -- a public company that for years has seemingly made public every wedding, child's birth, true love, false positive, job change and life accomplishment. (Not to mention every burrito, margarita and night on the town.)

Even with Facebook's unexpectedly tepid market debut, the stock offering's numbers are staggering. Facebook hit the morning market as a company worth more than $100 billion -- unmatched in history. It will raise up to $18.4 billion selling part of itself to investors. The young hoodie-wearing co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, added another billion-plus to his fortune, making him a $19-billion man.

But none of those are the biggest numbers in this story. The biggest number is 900 million -- as in more than 900 million regular Facebook users. It's big, because that number -- and doubling it or tripling it or who knows -- is key to Facebook's success. But mostly it's big because that's how many people care about Facebook.

Think about it: An IPO in the valley brings a certain giddiness, a certain sense of brash ambition, even among those who have no chance in a million or a billion of ever making a penny on the big liquidity event.

But this one is different. This one is more than just a bunch of 20-something Facebookers trading their skateboards for Ferraris (or more likely Tesla Roadsters). This is more than just one superstar co-founder piling up a billion and a half in fun money and finding himself worth more than the Google (GOOG) guys and some Caribbean countries.

This is a Silicon Valley IPO that is being cheered by people around the world -- and not because they are investors, but because they are customers, or more accurately members.

"Watching from Barcelona," a woman named Victoria Chen posted on Facebook before the company's stock started trading. "I guess everyone can join in on the fun."

There was a certain poetry. During the biggest IPO spectacle in history, some spectators were able to follow the action on the marquee product of the very company whose stock they were watching. And not just follow the action, but comment on it and exchange observations, rumors and emotions -- yes, emotions involving a stock sale.

I'd argue no tech company launching its IPO has been as deeply intertwined in people's lives as Facebook.

"Congratulations Mark Zuckerberg on your historic opening of the Nasdaq all the way from Menlo Park," Janopetsa tweeted 45 minutes before Facebook started trading. "And on the imminent FB IPO."

Never mind that buying early stock was almost exclusively reserved for insiders. Facebook, more than any company before it, is our company.

It goes without saying, though I'll say it, that each mega-IPO becomes bigger than the last, in large part because we're enthralled by the new and bored by the old. Past IPOs for the ages couldn't be as big a deal as what we're living through right now. But maybe -- and particularly because of Facebook's flaccid stock start -- it's wise to remember the valley's brief history of "IPOs that will change the world."

First it was Netscape. Then Yahoo (YHOO). Then a flurry of late 1990s fireworks that burned out as quickly as they ignited. We had a recent spate of also-rans with Pandora, Zynga and LinkedIn. And of course, there was Google, the IPO to end all IPOs, at least until Facebook came along. They all seem a blur now, but I particularly remember Netscape.

I was a Silicon Valley rookie in 1995 when the company started by Marc Andreessen, a kid from the University of Illinois, and Jim Clark, a valley veteran, went public. The company was a few blocks from the Mountain View condo where my wife and I lived. The Web was new to me and Netscape looked like a ragtag operation built on a foundation of pizza and late nights. But by the end of its first trading day, the company was worth $2.3 billion and its young co-founder Andreessen was worth $59 million, which was real money in those days.

I was astounded and wondered where it would all lead. It turns out, in Netscape's case, it ultimately led to oblivion.

Which isn't to say that the valley's history makes Facebook's IPO any less a holiday in Silicon Valley. It just makes it a holiday that we -- and others around the world -- celebrate with our eyes wide open.
