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Even as all sorts of questions swirl around last week’s initial public offering and this week’s release of a camera app that looks a lot like the camera app it paid $1 billion for last month, Facebook has taken its usual quiet stance, issuing as few public statements and offering as few public answers as possible to the questions that business journalists and tech bloggers have been asking.

It’s a tried-and-true public relations tactic: While startup companies crave the kind of exposure that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to public relations firms, established tech players often pick and choose when they speak, if they choose to speak at all.

Steve Wozniak, two years later

It’s been fun to watch the normally exuberant tech press go through the rationalization process of what went wrong with Facebook’s IPO, starting with claims that Friday’s flat opening meant the IPO was perfectly priced to outright ignoring the story. It’s been almost as much fun as watching the business press declare Facebook dead on arrival.

Before we dig too deeply into either discussion, let’s remember that the same doubts, along with the same proclamations that an issue had chilled the tech IPO market, were being bandied about eight years ago in the days after Google went public.

Facebook’s initial public offering is believed to have created as many as 1,000 new millionaires Friday, many of them employees who helped build the world’s largest social network. Now that the company is public, Facebook’s biggest challenge may be making sure it doesn’t have an exodus of talent.

What to do with that $500 cash balance burning a hole in my IRA?

Buy Facebook. It ended up being so much easier than they said it would be.

Facebook became a $104.2 billion company Friday in much the same way it became the world’s biggest social network and a cultural game-changer: by stubbornly forging ahead despite criticism and calls that it couldn’t be done.

From here on out, Facebook will not be measured by the number of registered users, the number of photos being uploaded every minute or the number of likes and comments left by its more than 900 million members.

Facebook became a publicly traded company at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Friday, and from here on out, Facebook will first and foremost be measured by its share price.

Are we or aren’t we? When it comes to social media bubbles and whether or not we’re in one, there is no shortage of people willing to argue on each side of the debate. 

It doesn’t matter if Facebook finishes Friday, its first day as a publicly-traded company, with a valuation of $105 billion or $75 billion: The debate is sure to get more intense in the coming weeks, months and possibly years. Earlier this month in the buildup to Facebook’s IPO, we took a look at the social media bubble (or lack thereof) in a five-part series that was based on dozens of interviews with experts on both sides of the divide.

On the eve of Facebook’s initial public offering, and two weeks after writing a five-part series that tried to answer the question of whether we’re in a social media bubble, the most striking thing to me is how divided people are on whether these astronomical values and this unlikely craze can be sustained.

Hundreds of tweets, comments, emails and more than the occasional accusations of being both a “Facebook naysayer” and “Facebook apologist” all at once leave me no closer to answering that question. But they do leave me with one important conclusion, no matter where you stand on the notion that we may or may not be in a social media bubble: We need Facebook’s IPO to work. We need what may be one of the biggest companies and biggest phenomena of our lifetimes to really be everything that those who don’t believe in the social media bubble say it is.

The Associated Press reports that millions of people are resisting pressure to sign up for Facebook, and a new study suggests that 93% of users “hate” the relatively new Timeline - with some even threatening to quit.

But before you call your broker and cancel your order in tomorrow’s initial public offering of Facebook shares, consider this: It doesn’t matter. 

General Motors Co. said on Tuesday that it would stop advertising on Facebook because the platform didn't generate enough sales. It is certainly not a great day for the social media giant, as it looks to float its initial public stock offering on Friday. Before you heed the naysayers, though, consider what Facebook is really good at.