The man of the day. (Photo: flickr.com/rubygoes)

And that's all she wrote! Enjoy your weekend, try not to spend it on Facebook. 

6:06 p.m.: Cue the speculation on the next Facebook to go public. Over on Quora, Dropbox and Box.net are two names that come up repeatedly. But Dan Primack thinks it might be the enigmatic Palantir. It certainly has a tagline that promises a pop. "We solve the world's biggest problems," Palantir declares boldly on its landing page.

5:59 p.m.: The debate on whether FB stock was priced correctly or not rages on.

@karaswisher @danprimack not the right price if bankers had to prop it up. that's not the market price. (but probably pretty close)

— chris dixon (@cdixon) May 18, 2012

5:55 p.m.: Facebookers, on the hand, are doing just fine, at least judging by their beamers.

At a woodside gas station near Facebook.Employee (shirt and backpack) just pulled up with a brand new M3. You can't make this up,

— Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) May 18, 2012

5:41 p.m.: Bloomberg reports that the SEC is investigating the trading delay. "Staff will review the incident with Nasdaq to determine cause..." LOL, says NYSE. More bad news for NASDAQ, Bloomberg also says traders didn't get order confirmation for $FB shares for as long as 4 hours.

Hearing that many traders STILL have not gotten order confirmation on $FB trades made during today's IPO. #nasdaqfail

— Sam Gustin (@samgustin) May 18, 2012

5:15 p.m.: Nice charts from Josh Brown and Joe Weisenthal describing the battle to keep Facebook from falling below the offering price of $38. "It's very typical for underwriters to step in and stabilize the price right around the offering number," Charles Jones, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, told The Observer. "It's fairly par for the course in a cold IPO."

4:16 p.m.: More than 560 million Facebook shares traded (electronic) hands today, and while high volume is not atypical for an IPO, today's total may indicate the divide between Facebook bulls and bears.

“Disagreement tends to cause volume—it indicates there are buyers and sellers," Robert Whitelaw, finance department chair at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told The Observer. "If everyone agreed, you could get a huge price shift and almost no volume. The price would almost automatically move. That wasn’t the case here.”

“This wasn’t quite a resounding success,” he added.

4:00 p.m.: Ding, ding, ding, ding! At the end of regular trading hours, Facebook closed at $38.18, up 0.47 percent from the start of trading. That sound you're not hearing is the glaring absence of a pop.

3:55 p.m.: Zynga investors are likewise not having the best day.

Tears With Friends RT @ReformedBroker: RT @howardlindzon: Zynga breaking $7...it's panicville $znga $sweb

— George V. Hulme (@georgevhulme) May 18, 2012

3:52 p.m.: About 8 minutes to go until regular Market Hours end on Nasdaq and Facebook is down to $38.01, up a hair from an earlier dip.

To put it another way: Virtually every single investor who bought Facebook shares today has already lost money.$FB

— Dennis K. Berman (@dkberman) May 18, 2012

3:39 p.m.: Did the Facebook IPO just ruin Silicon Valley as we know it? So argues serial entrepreneur and Berkeley and Stanford professor Steve Blank over at The Atlantic. This whole event the tech world is celebrating? It's tantamount to "dancing on its grave."

"For Facebook, it's spectacular. But Silicon Valley is screwed as we know it.

If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years,  at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick? If you're a VC firm, you're tossing out your life science division. All of that stuff is hard and the returns take forever. Look at social media. It's not hard, because of the two forces I just described, and the returns are quick."

3:26 p.m.: Back to the tennis match: The stock is down below $39 (would the underwriters let shares fall below the offering price of $38?), and this is feeling more and more like a failure. Yes, shares opened up 11 percent, proof you might argue, that the offering was priced correctly. But from the delayed opening (we get that the trading volumes were massive, but...that was a surprise?), to the modest pop (hardly seemed worthy of the biggest tech IPO), Facebook and its investment banks are going home with pockets filled, but probably not incredibly happy...

1:45 p.m.: Celebrity short-sellers? They happen. New England Patriots all-star Wes Welker is advising his followers on how to handle the Facebook IPO:

You may want to consider how many times this man has been concussed before enlisting his financial advisory services.

1:30 p.m.:  A tipster IMs in: "saw one of the winklevii in the gym on monday, btw." No word on how despondent it was. Also, from the genius pit at The Daily Beast, a slideshow of Mark Zuckerberg photoshopped into fashionable clothing that aren't hoodies. That actually happened.

1:15 p.m.:  By the way, with our readers' help, we've created a Spotify Playlist just for Facebook's IPO day! Special thanks to MetsGirl blogger @CarynRose, Jeff Rosenthal of It's The Real, Gizmodo's Sam Biddle, one-half of Fuck Yeah Menswear and Complex editor Lawrence Schlossman, and one @folinsbeek. This is kind of wonderful and awesome:

1:00 p.m.:  And we're now almost half way through Facebook's first day of trading, and the 'Book is still down. ABC News anchor Dan Harris picked up one share, and isn't too happy about his results so far:

Meanwhile, you should know: We reached out to The Brothers Winklevii last night for an IPO gameday interview. What'd they have to say?

Hey Foster,

Thanks for your email and interest. We are not doing any press or media tomorrow so unfortunately will be unable to participate.

Best,

Cameron

Sent from my iPhone

Womp-wommmmmmmmmmp. What, guys, couldn't take time off of your busy Olympic training schedule to satiate the needs of a bloodthirsty and schadenfreude hungry press who wants to know just how much suffering you're experiencing at this very moment? Ridiculous.

12:30 p.m.: Mark Zuckerberg's shares are now worth almost $21 billion. It would be cool if they get to $28 billion, which would be a billion dollars for every year he's been alive.

12:19 p.m.: NASDAQ is still seeing some hiccups in electronic trading, the Wall Street Journal reports. And to think, this morning CEO Bob Greifeld was so happy.

12:13 p.m.: Occupy Wall Street weighs in.

#facebookIPO is again building on the backs of the public. The company should be owned by the users not the usual youtu.be/rpbRXXntGM8

— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallSt) May 18, 2012

12:01 p.m.: Share price is getting off the $38 floor; trading with a 39-handle (we've always wanted to write that), shares are down in the 5-6 percent range from the $42.05 open. Not much of a pop!

11:49 a.m.: Facebook is very close to the opening price at $38, dipping as low as $38.07. Time for the underwriters to start working the phones, Bloomberg says.

But guess who took a hard dip? NASDAQ's own share price, after the long delay in opening.

(Source: CNBC)

11:45 a.m.: 

@felixsalmon a 10% pricing is the minimum to indicate respectable demand. Pricing that's too high, like this, indicates company greed.

— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 18, 2012

11:40 a.m.: Stock listing down around $40, much too sane for our liking. You mean we busted out in hives for a mere $100 billion valuation? Meanwhile, Bloomberg reporting that Facebook has been named in a $15 billion class action suit, with plaintiffs alleging that Facebook invaded their privacy by tracking Internet use.

11.31 a.m. Hovering around $42.00. "We are all very rational these days. Where is the hype?"

11:30 a.m.: IT BEGAN! Yahoo, "Life as we know it has just changed."

11:17 a.m.: The commentators at Yahoo Finance are flummoxed as to the reason for the delay. "I don't know why this would be?" host Jeff Macke wondered. "This is trading at the NASDAQ, it's all electronic trading," Matt Nesto said. "They should have it open right now, I don't know why they don't have it open right now... I think maybe there's not as much demand as they thought there would be."

11:13 a.m.: The opening is delayed! No opening yet! You can watch live coverage at Bloomberg, Yahoo and Reuters. Bloomberg is saying the stock will start trading at 11:15.

11:02 a.m.: Uh oh, the NASDAQ livestream is down. Trading is also delayed by five minutes, according to CNBC, so shares should officially be released at 11:05a.m.

11:00 a.m.: The Observer's executive editor Aaron Gell is doing excellent FB-related standup on Twitter right now.

10:46 a.m.: A good thread at Kid Dynamite’s World on the success (or lack thereof) investors had getting shares allocated at E*Trade. Kid Dynamite asked for 10,000, got 100 (doh!); from the comments, his was not an atypical experience. That's going to feel a lot worse when all hell breaks loose in 14 minutes...

10:30 a.m.: Check out some sweet $FB-related tweets.

10:24 a.m.: And here is video of that remote bell opening, starring some very excited Facebookers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3UoO5xK0A&feature=youtu.be

Note the moment, 30 seconds in, when Zuck very nearly knocks over the podium. It's okay, we'd be feeling a little light-headed, too. And was Sheryl Sandberg actually bouncing up and down?

10:21 a.m.: In Europe, pre-market bids hit 58 euros a share, or $73.65, enough to push the valuation of the company to vomit-inducing heights of more than $200 billion. Seriously, pull over. We may be sick.

Screen shot from Zero Hedge:

10:04 a.m.: Well, well, well. Look what Zuck posted on his Facebook wall:

TechCrunch explains how they did it. (Apparently something so simple required a fair bit of coordination.)

9:58 a.m.: Waiting for Facebook's fashionably late opening, and wondering what Zuck's worth right...now. Our hoodie-clad hero may not “care about money,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t gawk. Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.2 percent of Facebook, according to the website whoownsfacebook.com; $38 share values the IPO at $104 billion, putting Mr. Zuckerberg on a pretty pretty net worth of $29.3 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaire Index’s more scientific methods put the boy wonder at $19.3 billion, slotting him in at 29^th on the list of the world’s richest persons, between candy company heiress Jacqueline Badger Mars and some guy named Larry Page.

9:37 a.m.: The tour of Facebook's Midtown office this afternoon, part of an Internet Week initiative called WalkaboutNYC, is sold out. Here's what you're missing:

(Photo: WalkaboutNYC)

9:17 a.m.: It's a bittersweet day for SecondMarket, which loses one of its most profitable offerings as Facebook stock moves from the secondary markets to the primary ones. But the company still wants to be in the conversation. We just got an email blast directing us to a history of Facebook on Second Market. Facebook's price per share was $3.50 when an employee first approached SecondMarket to sell. Ha! Ha!

9:05 a.m.: SO EXCITED!

8:57 a.m.: Facebook has announced its shares will debut at $38, substantially higher than Groupon's $20. It's all hands-on-deck across the web as journalists and publicists jockey for airtime. As expected, Mark Zuckerberg will not be in New York, but will ring the NASDAQ opening bell remotely from Palo Alto, a symbol of the enormous power he will accrue and may exercise with a single flick of a switch, as Facebook takes over the world. Trading opens at 11 a.m., because Facebook is special NASDAQ opens trading on IPOs later in the day, to give them their own special time. Henry Blodget returns to the spotlight as the prodigal pundit reformed, pooh-poohing the prospect of buying into Facebook as a regular ol' investor. "This is. Muppet. Bait," he said this morning on CNBC's Squawkbox—savvy investors are gonna hit it and quit it. Gizmodo's Brian Barrett throws another wet blanket.

Friday, early: The blogs put out a wide range of anticipatory crap, such as an image of a Facebook share and a report of a poster at the Facebook Toronto campus that reads "Likers Gonna Like."