As if the world can't get enough of Facebook, it looks like investors love the company, too.
Now Facebook is raising the target price range for its shares ahead of the big IPO.
And as we wait for Facebook's big debut, Dan Simon took a look back at the social networks that didn't make it.
It may be the biggest, but Facebook wasn't the first social network.
To understand its rise, you also have to look at the missed opportunities, the blunders from the competition.
Facebook from the very beginning has focused like a laser on the quality of their product, the quality of the user experience.
Something that wasn't done by rival sites like MySpace and Friendster, according to industry insiders like Greg Gretsch.
Friendster's problem was performance. When their usage spiked, they had...
their page load times went from almost instantaneous to taking 30, 40 seconds. Users wouldn't put up with that.
The fall of MySpace was even more pronounced.
Rupert Murdoch bought the site in 2005 for $580 million. Last year, it sold for $35 million.
Those two companies both thought of themselves more as sort of fashion
and truly social businesses whereas Facebook, through Zuckerberg, thought of itself as a company using technology to make the world more social.
He didn't think of it, and he still doesn't think of it to this day as a quote, unquote "social network."
As the competition floundered, Zuckerberg assembled a world-class team of engineers, focusing entirely on the product, constantly rolling out new features.
We're making it possible to build a completely new class of apps.
And allowing other innovative companies to build on top of its platform.
Facebook enabled the rise of Zynga, which made video games social. Zynga mushroomed into a $5 billion company.
More than a dozen developers have worked with us to build social music apps.
The Facebook tentacles are long. Virtually every company and every new digital service considers its Facebook strategy.
It has a capacity to bring sort of this social interaction that we have with our friends throughout everything that we do in life. And the potential of that is vast.
But challenges lurk ahead. Facebook has lagged in mobile, part of the reason it shelled out a billion dollars for Instagram.
It also needs to keep growing its advertising and its user base while having to continually fend off competitors.
What Mark Zuckerberg worries about is not the Googles of the world. What he worries about is the upstart, the three guys in a garage that figure out the new social network.
With seemingly unlimited money and talent, Facebook appears to have few obstacles.
But in the world of technology it's dangerous to think that way. Just ask the folks at BlackBerry and Yahoo!