Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin is taking quite a bit of heat for renouncing his U.S. citizenship prior to the social network giant’s estimated $100 billion IPO this Friday. And after apparently growing tired of people painting him as greedy, he’s now speaking out.

Saverin told the New York Times today that he filed the paperwork to renounce his citizenship in January 2011, but it wasn’t approved until the following September. The government then reported his renouncement in April as part of a regular process. It just worked out that the announcement happened to coincide with Facebook going public, he said.

“This had nothing to do with taxes,” Saverin told the New York Times.

However, the 30-year-old does stand to save an estimated $100 million for dropping his U.S. citizenship. The Times points out that Saverin is currently living as a permanent citizen of Singapore, a country that doesn’t collect a capital gains tax. Essentially, that means it’s very attractive for rich people.

“I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen,” Saverin also said.

I don’t really buy his logic. Captain Planet is a global citizen. He’s also a hero and someone who’s going to take pollution down to zero. Saverin, on the other hand, is a billionaire with a Harvard economics degree who lives in capitalist-friendly Singapore. These two identities have nothing in common. That doesn’t make Mr. Saverin a bad person, it just means he’s not a global citizen.

In the New York Times report, Saverin seemed concerned about his personal image. He quashed the notion that he leads a playboy lifestyle, explaining that, “It’s a misperception, especially the playboy… I do have a Bentley. I do go out. I’d rather not go into personal details.”

Also, the depiction of him from hit movie The Social Network (which is based on the true story of how Facebook was founded) was “more art than documentary,” he said. One of the key elements of the film’s story was Mark Zuckerberg’s betrayal of Saverin. The film even ended with Zuckerberg agreeing to a settlement to avoid a costly and messy lawsuit between he and Saverin. These details are true, but Saverin said “there was no burning there. Mark is a phenomenal guy.”

There is some truth to Saverin’s statement though. He and Zuckerberg are among the very few people who, at a young age, have achieved an incredible level of success so quickly. Both men also share an inability to speak to the press in a natural manner.

Kidding aside, Saverin does seem keenly aware of his situation. According to the report, he’s asked a number of very rich individuals for advice on how they handled their success. He’s also honest about the difficulty in trying to wrap his head around his wealth — a problem most people probably wouldn’t mind having.

Saverin photo via National University of Singapore

Facebook is getting ready for what may be history’s largest initial public offering for a tech company on Friday. But is it really a good business?

Maybe not, say an increasing number of critics, who point to how Facebook ads don’t work as well as marketers might hope. As a result, General Motors unfriended the social network, and now, says Larry Kim of internet marketing software firm Wordstream, Facebook ads aren’t converting surfers into customers effectively.

We’ve known for some time that Facebook ads have poor engagement. In fact, they have an average click-through rate of .05 percent, which is almost 10 times worse than Google’s display ad network. That means that for every thousand viewers, precisely half a person will click on your Facebook ad.

For the full, ugly details, see Kim’s infographic at the bottom of this post.

Even for an increasingly ad-blind internet, that’s not just bad, it’s horrific. So VentureBeat talked to Kim and asked: What is it about Facebook ads that makes click-through rates so low?

“There are two factors, primarily,” said Kim. “The first has to do with ad formats. On Facebook, you have very vanilla, very basic ads only. They’re not very compelling, and not very engaging.” In contrast, ad units on other sites or apps are richer, more media-centric, and more interactive. And, there’s simply more choice in style, size, and positioning.

“The second problem is ad targeting,” Kim said. “Facebook is really, really good at identifying demographics and interests, but not very good at deciphering intent.” In other words: Facebook knows who you are, but it doesn’t know very much about what you want right now. As Kim says, “Just because you like cars doesn’t mean you’re ready to buy a car today.”

The result is predictable: irrelevant ads. “We define relevancy as the right message to the right people at the right time,” says Kim. If a message isn’t relevant, you’d expect it to be ignored, and that’s what’s actually happening on Facebook, he says.

This, of course, compares poorly with Google, where intent is much clearer, particularly on searches. If someone is Googling for a specific keyword right now, it’s a pretty good indication of their intent — much better than the fact they “liked” Car & Driver‘s Facebook brand page some time ago.

So what’s causing the issue? Kim blamed lack of innovation. Sponsored ads were Facebook’s most recent ad format update, but Kim is not impressed. “I applaud Facebook for trying to be more engaging and relevant, but this is their second ad effort in six to seven years.”

“I wish Mr. Zuckerberg could be open to the possibility that ads would not ruin Facebook, and delivering the right ads could deliver value to both advertisers and users,” Kim said. “I think it would be really profound if they could get a clue.”

Photo credit: Luc Legay on Flickr

Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter on Thursday at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ahead of the company’s much, much, much anticipated IPO.

There is an internal event page for the big day that has about a thousand Facebook employees RSVP-ing for the bell ringing early on Friday morning. We can’t tell if there are any other big festivities prepared ahead of time. It’s all up in the air. Some people may dress up though. We don’t know if the gong will be used. Zuck will probably give some remarks as he has ahead of other hackathons.

“We want to get everyone together and remind ourselves that this company is about building things,” a source says.

Facebook has long emphasized the “Hacker Way,” which is about building things fast and constantly iterating on the status quo. Zuckerberg argued in Facebook’s original IPO filing that the word ‘hacker’ has long been misconstrued.

“The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” he wrote. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

In the tradition of other hackathons, expect some interesting product ideas to get fleshed out. Facebook Hackathons are a chance for employees to work on half-baked ideas and turn them into real products that eventually get shipped. Everything from Facebook’s chat system to an early version of Timeline called ‘Memories’ have come out of Hackathons. Even the famous ‘Fax’ button that Facebook once pranked Jason Kincaid with also came out of a hackathon.

In the meantime, while you’re in between reading all of mainstream media and blogosphere’s senseless blathering about what Facebook is really worth, enjoy these photos of Facebook employees sleeping at headquarters.

Update: Facebook engineering manager Pedram Keyani complains in the comments that we are not showing enough people hacking and are perhaps giving a misguided impression that people sleep at Facebook hackathons. So correction: They do not sleep. They rage.

It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.

Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm?

Thanks to online privacy company Abine, we now have a simple tool by which we can calculate our monetary value to Facebook. In good old dollars and cents.

To illustrate the potential for Facebook to lose sight of the importance of the individual (and his or her privacy) amidst the pressure to maintain its ridiculously high valuation/metrics, Abine has created a quiz called the “Val-You Calculator,” which, based on your answers to seven questions, determines the dollar value you represent as a user.

These questions ask you where you live (most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from North American companies), how many friends you have, whether or not you play Zynga games, for example, all in an effort to demonstrate that your personal data comes with an implicit dollar-value.

According to Abine, its Val-You Calculator uses data from Facebook’s S-1 filing, as well as “independent financial and market research analysts, Facebook advertisers, and our own internal modeling and estimates.” A little bit of magic, and presto, you can see how much revenue you generate for Big Blue.

Of course, when it comes to IPOs, with a ton of financial information being disclosed for the first time, naturally the magnifying glasses come out, books are scrutinized, business models molested, etc. For better or for worse. Regardless of the hot air that gusts from pundits, privacy will continue to be a serious concern for Facebook users going forward. In fact, just last week, Facebook launched a major update to its privacy policies in compliance with an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.

Among those changes, Facebook one-upped Google and created the “Facebook Terms and Policies Hub” to bring its 10 critical privacy policy documents under one roof. As the social network explained in a blog post, the changes are being made in an effort to increase the level of transparency around its handling of users’ personal data. And, as Josh details, for the most part, these changes seem logical, user friendly, and anything but suspicious, as some might have you believe.

That being said, with a scary-big user base creating even scarier amounts of big data, and considering that its model revolves around revenue derived from targeted, personalized ads, privacy advocates believe that the coming pressure to beat projections in the public markets leaves our personal data in a precarious position. The shortest line between A and big quarterly gains is a straight line to selling our private data to marketers.

In a recent survey, Abine found that 75 percent of its users wouldn’t leave Facebook alone in a dark room with their data, a sentiment that was confirmed by an independent AP-ABC poll in which nearly 60 percent of respondents had “little to no trust in Facebook to keep their information private.”

By updating its privacy policies, Facebook is working to allay those concerns, and its made progress. Yet, as Josh points out, privacy policy won’t be its only concern. Beyond making moves to stay on the right side of the law, down the road Facebook may face government regulation in regard to privacy. If a governing body were to place restrictions on how the company launches products, or displays features, for example, it could become increasingly vulnerable to the competition.

As it feels the pressure to drive big returns, Facebook may be forced to devise more clever ways to utilize data. It can think bigger, and will, but then it has to worry about mobile. As it has itself admitted, mobile is a big threat, and the company’s growth may be impeded as it works to keep up adequate transparency and has to show fewer ads per user as a result.

Whether or not this will significantly affect revenue in the long-term remains to be seen, however, thanks to Abine and Val-You, at the very least, Facebook will know exactly how much ad revenue each of its users represent. And that, my friends, is priceless.

Sadly, I was only worth a little over $50 to Facebook. Clearly, I’m not a good customer. What about you?

For more on Abine, find them here, or get your own Val-You appraisal here.

Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market.

Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world.

The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it, its overrun by ads, there’s something better, or it’s simply uncool, Facebook could fade away.

It’s size, network effect, and wise leadership could protect it from these threats, and honestly, I think Facebook has the potential to be successful for a long, long time. But if you had to bet against Facebook, here’s what you’d be betting on.

Big Brother

Facebook is banned in China and access is or has been restricted in several countries including Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Right now this is limiting the social network’s growth potential. But if disputes with governments over what content is appropriate cause it to be shut out of more countries, these roadblocks could divert users to other local social networks. That would fracture the value that comes with having such a high percentage of internet users in one place. For example, Singapore is a valuable market with a strict government that could drop the ban hammer on Facebook.

Regulation around privacy could also slow Facebook down and make it more vulnerable to competition. Facebook narrowly escaped privacy audits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union. If the government of a core market put restrictions on how Facebook can launch new products or what features it can show where, it could create opportunities for startups to eat Facebook’s lunch. Imagine how much bigger a threat Foursquare would be if Facebook had been restricted from launching its Places location service.

Competition From The Next Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook doesn’t actually need to worry much about Twitter, Google+, or international players. They’ve failed to offer something revolutionary enough to make early adopters ditch Facebook, or mainstream enough to appeal to everyone. What big blue needs to worry about is the next social product visionary, the next Mark Zuckerberg that could turn Facebook into the next Myspace.

While acquiring and acq-hiring top talent from companies like Instagram was easy when it had pre-IPO stock to throw around, recruiting that next Zuck to side with Facebook rather than wage war against it is about to get tougher. Same goes for keeping its current rockstars from leaving to start a true competitor.

It might take a big hardware change like eyewear computers, holograms, or apps you download straight to your brain to finally make Facebook obsolete. Even then that upstart would have quite the uphill battle, but so did Facebook when it launched.

Smaller Screens, Small Ad Revenue

Staying afloat on display ads won’t cut it if the social network wants to live up to or surpass its ~$100 billion valuation, as Chris Dixon writes. It will have to think bigger. But for now, it has to worry about mobile.

Handheld devices have less room for ads and Facebook’s long list of features. Currently, Facebook only shows a few mobile news feed ads per user per day, while it shows as many as four to seven ads per page on the web. But if Facebook chokes mobile with too many ads, usage could plummet. As more users shift the time they spend on Facebook from the web to mobile, it will make less of the money that keeps the lights on for the whole service.

To counteract this Facebook is aggressively acquiring and hiring from mobile companies like Instagram in hopes of getting its mobile site and apps up to draw more eyeballs. However, while it has a huge footprint of over 500 million mobile users, there’s widespread discontent with the speed of its mobile apps. Many people think they’re cluttered, and complain of slow loading speeds.

Mobile is the biggest threat to Facebook, and the company admits it. If it can’t make more compelling mobile apps and earn more money from these small screens, the shift to mobile will see Facebook lowered into its own grave.

Losing Its Cool

Facebook doesn’t want to be cool. It wants to be a utility. It wants to be the cell phone or the television, not Virgin Mobile or HBO. But the fact is that a big reason Facebook is so popular is because it started by being accessible to only the most envied demographic in the world: Ivy League college students like those at Harvard. It used that prestige to spread like wildfire on every American college campus, and the sexiness of young adulthood to capture the teenage market. Its popularity in the trendsetting United States soon pulled in the rest of the world.

But now your mom is on Facebook. You grandma, professor, little cousins, and plumber are too. It’s not exclusive anymore. Usefulness is what keeps it afloat, but cold, dry, utility for everyone is vulnerable. And soon Zuckerberg will be 30, and he might no longer be seen as the geeky boy genius challenging the adults. He’ll be one of those adults. There are already signs that apathy and distrust for Facebook are setting in.

The slick destroyer of today’s social network would be something that starts elite but that gradually opens up like Facebook did. It would be designed specifically for the hip and young in-crowd. It would recruit big celebrities and carve out an influential niche from which to grow its power. This could be what makes Facebook seem old and boring. And the average Facebook user doesn’t want to go somewhere boring every day. That’s what their jobs are for.

[Image Credit: WaterySoul, TheFW, E:TB.]

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook, says The Wall Street Journal according to “people familiar with the matter.” But I spoke to a source close to Facebook that characterize GM’s efforts as “taking one swing and deciding to quit.” My source says GM’s efforts weren’t social enough, focusing on building apps rather than launching social ad campaigns that spread by word-of-mouth.

So what went wrong, and does Facebook need to offer more flexibility to advertisers?

Facebook was reportedly unable to convince GM that its ads are an effective way to reach consumers. GM Marketing Chief Joel Ewanick reportedly told the Journal that the company “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.”

The auto maker supposedly spends a total of $40 million on Facebook, including $10 million on advertising, so the GM pullout won’t have a significant effect on Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenue. However, it’s certainly awkward to have this news break just a few days before Facebook’s IPO. (And the timing probably isn’t a coincidence.)

I’m guessing GM doesn’t see things that way, but it’s worth noting that Facebook has highlighted successful auto campaigns in the past. For example, there was a Kia campaign that led to a 13-percent increase in awareness for the Kia Soul, as well as a Mazda check-in deal in the United Kingdom that led to a 34 percent increase in sales of Mazda MX-5 during one of the campaign months. Isolated anecdotes? Sure, but at least they show that Facebook isn’t totally inhospitable to car companies.

If we take my source at their word, the GM news may also point to the fact that even if Facebook can work for large advertisers, there are challenges in bringing those advertisers on-board. Facebook executives themselves have said they’re moving away from traditional advertising to a new model, with ads that are built around stories. It’s a compelling idea, but for some traditional advertisers, it may be more appealing to just show a big, glossy ad — like the one that Ford ran on Facebook’s logout page.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

If anybody knows how to talk back to Facebook, it’s Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, America’s largest and most powerful advocacy group for kids. Steyer is the author of the new book, Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age, which includes an introduction by Chelsea Clinton and presents parents, teachers and politicians with a very practical and realistic strategy for managing the social media activities of children.

“It’s a conversation we need to have,” Steyer told me when he came into our San Francisco studio to talk about what he calls social media’s “epochal change”. Social media, he insists, is changing the cognitive development of kids, encouraging narcissism and changing the way their brains develop. It’s time Silicon Valley – particularly Google, Apple and Facebook – take leadership on this critical issue, he told me. But it’s not just technology companies that need to recognize the destructively transformational impact on kids. Everybody – from parents to teachers to politicians – need to learn to talk back to Facebook, he insists. Which is why, of course, he wrote his book.

But is Jim Steyer right? Do we really need to be having that conversation about Facebook with our kids?

Facebook has just closed a deal to hire the full team of seven employees from Android photosharing app developer Lightbox, which should reduce worries that mobile will be its downfall. The Lightbox Photos app developed by the 500 Startups company automatically created personal photo blogs from a user’s uploads. But now it will be shut down, has already been stripped from Google’s Play marketplace, and people have until June 15th to download their photos.

Along with the Instagram buy, the last-minute-before-IPO Lightbox hires will help assure investors that Facebook will do what it takes to win the very mobile-centric future of social networking. But the Lightbox talent acquisition still doesn’t illuminate how Facebook will make more money off of little screens.

Lightbox had taken a total of $1.2 million in funding from 500 Startups as well as Index Ventures, Accel Partners, SV Angel, and several angels. In a statement regarding the talent acquisition, Facebook said “The Lightbox team has incredible experience developing innovative mobile products that people love. We look forward to welcoming this world-class team of engineers to Facebook.”

Facebook has been frequently criticized for the slowness of its mobile apps. This talent acquisition of engineers could help it speed things up.

Lightbox developed consumer Android mobile apps. It’s first app Lightbox Photos cloud-hosted the photos from your Android device and synced them to your Android. It was designed to replace your Android camera app. When we covered it in December, Sarah Perez called Lightbox a lazy man’s Tumblr.

One problem with Instagram was that its content was very siloed. Users could only engage with its photos through its apps or on other social networks. There was no mobile site or website where you could comment or Like Instagrams.

But Lightbox auto-generates full-featured photo blogs with their own vanity URLs from a user’s uploads, so your friends and followers could interact with your photos from any interface. This understanding of the need for wide-accessibility will serve Facebook well.

While this talent acquisition should bolster confidence in Facebook’s mobile product, it doesn’t answer the question of how its going to to turn mobile into a massive revenue stream. Those two go together, though. The better the mobile product, the more mobile ads Facebook can get away with.

Similar to Instagram, Lightbox wasn’t just a photosharing app, but also a community where people browsed each other’s mini-masterpieces. However, Facebook won’t be adding that community to its 500+ million mobile population. Just Lightbox’s talent is joining the big blue social network, not the tech or users.

Some loyal Lightbox are already expressing their dismay about the app shutting down. Facebook was smart offer the one-month data portability period. If it keeps up this rate of acquisitions and acqui-hires, it will need to be considerate to the independent user communities it’s displacing.

Here’s the full statements from Lightbox’s blog:

Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. And that’s just mobile, it doesn’t even account for canvas apps or website integrations. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its funnel, Facebook is now able to, in a sense, play kingmaker, choosing what types of apps and content see traffic from its news feed. As Josh points out, this is true for content of all stripes, whether they be photos, games, or news readers — or the most recent and perhaps most-buzzed-about evidence: Open Graph video apps.

Since integrating with Facebook Timeline, the “Instagram for video” competitors, Viddy and Socialcam, have exploded. Viddy’s “Timeline Bump” saw it surpass some big names in its rise to the top of the App Store rankings. Since integrating, Viddy claims to be seeing 500K new users a day, and last week confirmed that it closed a $30 million Series B round at a reported $370 million valuation. Viddy’s success could be due to the Instagram Effect, a great product, its celebrity backers, or, perhaps more likely, it’s due in large part to its Timeline integration and Facebook promoting its content. Though some would say it’s a combination thereof.

Either way, Viddy and Socialcam are hardly alone. Flixster has seen referral traffic jump to 480,000 hits a day, up 10-fold from the prior month, while BranchOut’s recently launched, Facebook-integrated mobile app saw traffic leap from one million monthly active users to 12.5 million MAU. Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift. The latest additions to the cavalcade of integrators? The cult favorite community-directed Q&A site Quora and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy.

In a blog post last week, Quora announced its integration with Facebook Timeline, allowing users to more easily share their Quora activity with their Facebook friends. Users simply go to the homepage or their their Settings page, connect their Facebook account, and enable Timeline.

Once that’s done, Quora-ers can share questions, answers, posts they upvote, and people they follow to Facebook, with that content aggregated by type in a widget on their Facebook profile. In turn, Facebook friends will see the most interesting stories you’ve interacted with on Quora right in their news feed.

Of course, those who might be hesitant to enable this feature for the sake of avoiding spamming their friends’ feeds with every instance Quora activity, however, users will generally only see the five most recent upvotes, questions followed, etc., a cap that’s intended to keep the integration from overwhelming your profile. Generally speaking, the stories that do show up tend to do so because a number of friends all upvoted the same story.

On top of this, Quora also added a bit of granularity to its sharing options, as users can now share to both Facebook and Twitter when creating new questions, answers, and posts. You can choose whether you want to share a particular answer, for example, by checking/unchecking the Facebook and Twitter options.

The more Facebook is able to filter by relevancy to show stuff that’s created, shared by, and popular among your friends, the more addicting the experience — and this integration — becomes. At least that’s the intent anyway.

In terms of Quora, specifically, from my experience, it really can be a nifty enhancement to discovery. Frequently, we don’t have the time to spend hours combing through the database, so Facebook integration provides a great alternative for finding those gems that would otherwise go unseen.

For Facebook, the appeal is transparent. Any mobile app or web platform that has a highly engaged audience becomes a great potential source of ad revenue. Quora, which definitely qualifies in terms of an engaged audience, sends its clickable Q&A content to news feeds and Timelines, whereupon Facebook can serve relevant ads, promoting brands and experiences you and your friends are already interacting with and, as Josh points out, as users move towards mobile, Sponsored Stories can keep the same model and become a big source of revenue.

In turn, Quora just raised $50 million at a reported $400 million valuation, which D’Angelo says will be used to scale and expand its platform. If AppData is to be believed, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log in to the site through Facebook Connect — a small fraction of its total number of users. No doubt with deeper Facebook integration in place, Quora could see this number increase significantly — it’s a win-win for each side.

And considering that, as Josh describes at length, Facebook is controlling the news feed like an editor, curating the content its users see in their feeds and profiles, the close ties Quora’s founders have to Facebook could be a boon for its content on Facebook.

Of course, as mentioned previously, Quora is not alone. Yesterday, Khan Academy joined in on the fun, also announcing via blog post that it has added integration with the new Open Graph protocol to enable users to display their badges on their Facebook profiles.

For a little context for those unfamiliar with Khan, as users work their way through the platform’s repository of 3,200+ micro lecture video tutorials, they can earn badges for becoming proficient in three different skills or by quickly (and correctly) answering five quiz questions in a row, for example.

With its new Facebook integration, users can now click the “Share” button on any badge, and, once permission is granted, the badge will appear on users’ Timelines. (This share functionality also works for Twitter and email.)

After a user shares a couple of badges, just like the Quora Timeline experience, a dedicated section will appear in your Timeline, in this case for Khan “Badges Earned.” Users can, thankfully, edit or remove that view and if you’ve collected and shared more badges than can fit in the view, you can customize which badges appear and change settings for individual badges.

Not unlike Foursquare, if a user clicks on a particular badge (in this case on Facebook), they’ll be taken to a page that describes the steps it takes to earn the badge as well as a complete list of all badges offered by Khan.

Many educational platforms are on a mission to make their content more social and shareable, and this is an action taken by Khan Academy with that goal in mind. The badge experience adds a gamification element to its experience, but what good is collecting badges if you can’t show them off publicly to all your friends? It’s a great way to encourage competition among students, and for Khan, it offers an opportunity for exponentially-increased brand exposure.

Khan’s educational videos have racked up millions of hits on YouTube, but its name still remains relatively unknown outside of tech and educational circles. Now, with users displaying the badges on their Facebook profiles, friends that have no idea what Khan Academy is can click on those totally sweet badges (that’s a bit of snark, Khan definitely needs to work on these) and instantly walk through the process it takes to earn them, and, in turn, they are introduced to the Khan platform.

It would be surprising if content from both Khan and Quora didn’t get big play from Facebook curators. Both sites are fundamentally educational in nature (although perhaps a little more loosely used in Quora’s case), engaging, and have dedicated and active user bases. Badges and Q&A’s may be a little harder for Facebook to monetize that game apps and videos, but they both still provide tons of data on the user’s interests and behaviors during interaction on Facebook, with a peek into those behaviors outside of its network.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how much of a bump Khan and Quora receive from their respective Facebook integrations, and we will try to relay that info if and when they’re willing to share. But if Viddy, Socialcam, BranchOut, Flixster and many more are any indication, the Facebook Lift is coming soon.

For more, find Quora’s blog post here and Khan Academy’s here.

Everyone wants a piece of Facebook, so the company’s underwriters will likely exercise their option sell a “greenshoe” of up to 50.6 million additional shares, and Facebook will definitely increase its IPO share price range from between $28 and $35 to $34 and $38, I’ve confirmed with sources very close to the IPO. This means Facebook could sell up to 388 million shares to bring in between $13.1 billion and $14.7 billion at a CNBC-reported valuation between $92B and $103B.

A greenshoe is an SEC-permitted over-allotment option that can stabilize a stock’s price by allowing underwriters to sell up to 15% more stock than the company originally planned to sell, but with the option to buy back the stock at the offering price if the actual price drops below this. By exercising the greenshoe, underwriters including Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs could help Facebook bring in up to an additional $1.72 billion to $1.92 billion by selling up to 50.6 million shares, which could prevent high demand and limited supply from causing the share price to skyrocket and making the stock seem volatile.

“Quite likable indeed, har har” laughs some monocle-wearing banker on Wall Street.

The greenshoe option for underwriters was written into Facebook’s S-1 on May 3rd, but now one source has confirmed that underwriters will exercise the option and another said it was very likely. The S-1 states “We and the selling stockholders have granted the underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments.” Specifically that’s 6,029,988 shares directly from Facebook and 44,582,314 shares from the selling stockholders. That means the greenshoe could allow Facebook to raise an extra $204.6 million to $228.7 million.

The greenshoe is named after the first company, Green Shoe Manufacturing , to give underwriters the over-allotment option. Facebook could use the greenshoe to take advantage of stellar demand by selling more stock and raising more money. Alternatively, in the event that the share price falls below the offering price, Facebook’s underwriters could buy back all or some of that 15% at the offering price without losing money. In this way the greenshoe gives Facebook and its underwriters more control over the total pool of stock being traded and the price.

The fact that 526 million people use Facebook every day may have a lot to do with the strong demand for its stock. People around the world may be thinking to themselves “I can’t live without Facebook. It’s going to be around for a long time. I should invest.”

They may be right, at least about the first two parts. Facebook’s network effect is so strong that to be truly disrupted and fall from its place as the premier social network for everyone, another company would have to provide something much, much better than Facebook. Not just cooler features or faster apps or ties to search and other services (*cough* Google+ *cough*). But truly, revolutionarily better, and with a brilliant distribution strategy.

Whether that longevity makes Facebook a wise investment will depend heavily on its ability to make money on its mobile site and apps where it doesn’t currently show as many ads as its web interface. Its Sponsored Story in-news feed ads are a good start, but it will either need to show a lot of them or come up with another ad format or revenue stream. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook introduce full-screen, glossy, old magazine-style ads mixed in between organic news feed stories and more subtle Sponsored Stories.

Investors will need to make their plans quickly. Facebook will likely update its S-1 filing with the SEC over the next few days to make the $34 to $38 price range official, and possibly note the greenshoe. On Thursday it’s expected to set the actual IPO share price. And on Friday it all goes down with CEO Mark Zuckerberg opening trading of his company’s stock by ringing the NASDAQ bell from Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, Calif.

[Image Credit: Converse, Alamy. Updated body and headline to note May 3rd was specifically when greenshoe was written into S-1 and clarify that the news is that underwriters will exercise this existing option to sell 50.6 million extra shares]