Facebook IPO?

All indications are that Zuckerberg is taking Facebook all the way to Wall Street. I'd love to see a Facebook IPO.
froosh is hedging his bets that Facebook will file for an IPO in 08. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially priced itself out of the Mergers and Aquisitions market by leaving $1 billion on the table during their Yahoo negotiations.

Facebook clearly sees itself as/wants to be a Google. They want to be refered to as a tech companany as oppossed to a media
company. This all point to the fact that Zucs might make the company a publicly traded company just like Google.

"The companywide focus is on innovation and engineering, and the commitment to optimizing the user experience. The goal is
not to create a media company." - Mark Zuckerberg http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-hacker-dropout-ceo_3.html

They're posting wierd programming puzzles on their web site in an effort to attract "smart" employees, much akin to Google.

Finally, their financial backers would love for them to go all the way.

"Certainly most of our companies go through liquidity in the public markets ...Public markets seem to want to pay more than
acquirers these days."- Meritech founder, Paul Madera. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-hacker-dropout-ceo_3.html

Bofore they file for an IPO howerver, they need to find an experienced CEO (unless Zucks is crazy enough to do it himself), and make over $100M in revenue, just like Google.

A successful Facebook IPO might just herald a new era of Internet startup IPOs.