Facebook has just filed their initial public offering, the first step in taking the company public. For now the figure being raised is $5 Billion, which will turn hundreds of their employees into millionaires. Hopefully their contracts mean they have to stick around for a while after the filing is rubber stamped.

If you’re looking to buy stock, you’ll need to look for the trading symbol “FB”, after the SEC approves the filing. While exact shareholder stakes in Facebook have largely been kept secret, it is now revealed that Mark Zuckerberg still owns 28.4% of the company. Depending on the valuation of the company, Zuckerberg’s stake may be close to $30 billion once the IPO shares are sold.

The filing also reveals some astonishing figures listed below:

• Net income of $1 billion in 2011, $3.7 billion revenue.
• Facebook had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010.
• Facebook had 483 million daily active users (DAUs) on average in December 2011, an increase of 48% as compared to 327 million DAUs in December 2010.
• Facebook had more than 425 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011.
• There were more than 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of December 31, 2011.
• Facebook users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011.

There’s no denying it, those figures are amazing and demonstrates how strong the company is and why now is a great to to file for the IPO. I guess they haven’t yet reached the 1 billion users mark yet, or that’d be surely be included. The S-1 Registration Statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission is embedded below, all 201 pages of it.

Facebook S-1

More @ TechCrunch and The Verge.

Over the past couple of months, a growing number of buy, swap and sell Facebook groups have started emerging. The second hand good market sure is a lucrative one, something eBay and others have built multi-million dollar businesses on. But times are changing, the transaction of second hand good is going much more local, with Facebook groups exploding in numbers.

With more than 800 million users now on Facebook, the people who are transacting online, aren’t those business degree, come IT professional who’ve setup an online store. But rather your everyday, housewife, your brother, your wife, basically everyone. With the proliferation of smart phones, it’s easy to snap a photo, post it to the group, add a description and your done.

It seems no category is off the list, with everything from clothes to vehicles behind traded. Pickups are often listed as local only to achieve a quick sale and eliminate delivery costs. Previously the service of choice to get rid of used or unwanted goods was eBay, but by selling on Facebook there’s one huge advantage.. it’s free.

These local trading groups on Facebook are emerging as a real competitor to eBay’s successful and undercutting a large part of their business. eBay has shifted to focus much more on the traditional online store, selling to consumer model, rather than their auction business, perhaps they seen the writing on the wall.

As a member of a couple of these groups, I’m astounded at the rate of products being posted. Checking back multiple times per day, there’s often more than 20 new updates each time. All in a city of Albury Wodonga, that has only around 100,000 people. It’s likely in larger cities, that these groups are localised to suburbs, making it easier to find items in your area.

While Gaming and Photos are the biggest sections of Facebook, another key part to the social network is Events. So critical are Facebook Events, that those users not on Facebook were sometimes left off the invite list.

Events was actually dealt with pretty well, making it pretty simple for anyone to create one. So why the need to for another event management feature? As with anything Facebook, the are persistent on constantly evolving and innovating on features which is really something that should be commended.

Events still exist, but Make Plans is available front and centre for posting to your Wall. Start by picking a date, add a description and you can Make Plans. Think of this as Facebook’s version of a shared Calendar. You can also attach a time,  location, and invitees to your plans. You can also decide which of your Facebook Friends to share the Plans with.

It’ll take some time to see wether the feature takes off, but you can let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

If you look after a Page for your business on Facebook, you can now use it to live stream to the world. Currently there are two live streaming providers available to add to your page, Livestream and uStream, but there’s definitely room for this list to grow in the future.

The process is actually quite easy, click the provider of choice, select the page you wish to add the application to, then sign in. You can simply go with the default look or customise it with your branding, there’s also support for multiple shows and even creating a new show from within Facebook.

Wether you choose Livestream or uStream as your provider is irrelevant, if you are sold on the benefits of using Facebook for customer engagement, you should add this to your page.

More information @ Facebook Pages

Social ranking site Klout is currently experiencing an issue with Facebook data that is seriously reducing the scores of users.

We’re experiencing a temporary issue with Facebook data that may result in lower score this morning, we’re working quickly to resolve this.

While the problem is likely to be fixed soon, it is however very confronting for users to see such a dramatic drop. There’s been a lot of contention about the relevance or accuracy of Klout scores, but for those that care, scores matter. After Klout confirmed the issue was with Facebook, user comments are indicating that drops have been as much as 40 points. One user reporting their score of 53 went down to 13 overnight, and another 47 down to 25.

If the issue is just with Facebook, then its surprising how much weight Klout puts on that network compared to other connected. Personally my posts to the blog and twitter are far more influential content posted to Facebook. For those people that use Klout to filter content like twitter streams, a lot of content won’t be seen with the significant reduction in scores.

Personally I’ve been question the value I place on Klout,. While the idea of ranking social influence is great in concept, Australian Perks are pretty much non-existent. Also in the past week, despite gaining world-wide attention and over 1 Million views on YouTube video, my score actually went down (before this error).

Update
Klout have posted an update on the issue, detailing the cause (error with Facebook scores). Unfortunately the issue still exists, but as an interim measure they have returned Klout scores to what they were 1 day ago.

More at Klout on Facebook.

The world of location-based services and check-ins is certainly a fierce place to live. CNN are reporting that Facebook have purchased Gowalla, although there’s still no official post on the Gowalla blog. Known best for its gorgeous UI, and high profile investors like Kevin Rose, it seems none of that was a match for Facebook.

When Facebook launched their check-in feature last year, they were careful to invite ‘partners’ Gowalla and Foursquare, the two big players in the space at the time. With a user base of 800 million users, all but the die-hard users began moving their checkin behaviour to Facebook.

Seen by more of their friends, with more opportunity for comments, meetups and integration with an app you already use daily, it was a winning formula. While Gowalla originally started with a point of difference (collecting and leaving virtual items) the company ended up removing that.

Gowalla suffered not only from the introduction of Facebook Places, but were also lagged behind Foursquare’s rapid growth in user adoption. Foursquare offers an easy way to push check-ins to Facebook, meaning you can tap their deal system and post to your existing network there (assuming they all didn’t move to Facebook as well).

So let this be a lesson to any Industry, when Facebook decides to make a move in your direction, you’re headed for a world of hurt. The best hope you have is that they do the right thing and acquire your talent. In this instance, Facebook will take on most of Gowalla’s employees.

More information @ CNNMoney.

If you head to Facebook right now, you may see a new feature on your Wall, sorting. After Facebook recently changed the way information on your Wall was ordered (Top stories / Highlighted stories at top), a large number of users were unhappy. This option for sorting solves that issue and essentially returns your Facebook Wall to it’s previous state.

Recent Stories First: Stories will appear in the order they were posted. Highlighted stories will be marked with a blue corner.

Highlighted Stories First: Highlighted stories you haven’t seen yet will appear at the top of your News Feed. (If you don’t see highlighted stories, it’s because there aren’t any new highlighted stories since your last visit.)

More @ Facebook.

Thanks for playing Friendly and MyPad, the real Facebook iPad app has arrived. It may not show up for you immediately on the device, as it’s being rolled out worldwide. As a work around, you can use the link below from your iPad to get the app now !

The app does provide the standard status update, photos upload, location Check In and Chat. Pages, Groups, Events and Friends are all among the functionality we expected and are included. Navigation in the app is done quite elegantly, with a press of the menu button in the top-left (or swipe front left to right), the content slides right, to reveal the menu options.

Photo galleries support the usual iPad swiping goodness, and Nearby shows your friend’s pictures on a map at the last location they checked in.

The Facebook iPad app has a few shortcomings, there’s no ability to edit profile information and you can’t see that sexy new profile Timeline. There’s no ticker in the top-right, although judging from the feedback when it launched, most users won’t be heart broken about that omission.

That aside, if your an iPad and Facebook user, you should at least try it out. The official Facebook iPad app is available free from the App Store. Facebook have posted an official page for the application at http://www.facebook.com/mobile/ipad

Facebook iPad app gallery VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

If you’re a developer and keen to take advantage of the newly updated Open Graph, then your should check out the Facebook Developer’s site. While the keynote is still going, the dev site has already been updated.

Open graph will also support ratings. This means that application interactions posted to user’s walls, will provide analytics back to developers about what is most engaging and most annoying. This information can inform future development decisions.

Those who aren’t developers may also want to check out the site, as it contains a lot of information and images about today’s F8 announcements.

More info @ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/

Music service Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek took the stage to discuss the way Spotify are taking advantage of Facebook to allow users to discover new music. “Today is a big day for music” and “a big day for the music industry.”

Ek dropped a couple of bombshells without much reaction. He announced Facebook now has 800Million users, up from the previous 750 Million in July. He went on to say that Spotify will be available around the world. Currently Spotify only supports the US, UK, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, France and Finland.

We’ll need some further clarification on just what Ek meant by his statements, particularly if that includes Australia, lets hope so. Discovering new music via your Facebook friends is a neat idea, but the experience will be really broken if we end up seeing ‘I’m sorry your friend lives in a unsupported country’. In fact some of the best ways to discover new music is to watch the US or UK charts, so it makes sense this would be supported.

We’re all too familiar with how messed up media licensing is, something that seriously needs to be sorted for the innovation of tomorrow to take place. Facebook’s slide of initial media partners working on the new Open Graph, doesn’t showcase any Australian companies.. Alarm bells.