TPM provides a useful timeline on the IPO. Ryan Chittum chides Facebook for apparently giving big investors a heads up:
Regardless of whether anyone committed a crime, much less gets charged for one (don’t hold your breath), this ugly episode has shown very clearly how Wall Street, tech companies, and the venture capitalists who back them have been trying to inflate another bubble to enrich themselves.
David Futrelle hopes that the IPO will bring reforms:
[T]he furor over what looks an awful lot like insider trading could lead to regulatory reforms designed to thwart this kind of favoritism. In many ways the most appalling thing about the reports of Facebook’s early tipoffs to big investors is that what they did may have been perfectly legal – if morally and ethically dubious. In the Wall Street Journal, Ronald Barusch argues that regulators will have to move to close that loophole. “Look for new regulation where the role of the underwriting firms’ analysts is more formalized and all prospective investors have equal access to it,” he writes.
Zackary Karabell isn't ready to write off Facebook itself:
There are certainly those saying that the bungled offering shows that Facebook itself is a house of cards, a sign of a new New Economy bubble that has seen a variety of high-priced IPOs of popular but revenue-challenged companies go public at high valuation: Zynga, Pandora, and so on. But that is at the very least premature. Stock performance is not necessarily–or these days even usually—an indicator of corporate health or management acumen. Facebook’s shares sank below an offering price that was way too aggressive and is settling at about where it should have been before the process entered the maelstrom of Wall Street.
Felix Salmon observes:
[T]he winners in this whole game were you and I: the quiet skeptical masses who simply sat back and watched the farce unfold. In the game of Facebook IPO, it turns out, the only winning move was not to play.
The Dish 