Facebook Inc is taking the next step on its IPO journey and has summoned research analysts from Wall Street banks to its Menlo Park headquarters early next week for a pre-roadshow briefing to discuss the finer points of its business and books.

The world’s largest social network, which is racing toward what would be Silicon Valley’s largest ever initial public offering, will not disclose new information during the meeting with analysts.

Instead, it will outline its strategy and answer questions on how to analyze its operations and help analysts build models on its financials, two sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity because the meeting is not public.

Called a “due diligence meeting”, such pre-roadshow pow-wows are standard fare for future debutantes.

It is not clear how many analysts have been invited. One source said analysts from five to 10 of the largest banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO will likely attend the meeting.

A second source said analysts from most banks helping underwrite the offering have been invited to the meeting, scheduled for Monday. Both sources would not elaborate because of the conditions of the presentation.

Facebook listed 31 banks as underwriters on its IPO in an updated regulatory filing on March 7.

A spokesman for the company declined to comment.

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook is the world’s No. 1 online social network with more than 845 million users. The company plans to raise $5 billion in an IPO expected to value the company at $75 billion to $100 billion, in Silicon Valley’s largest-ever coming-out party.

Some on Wall Street worry about the company’s over-reliance on advertising for 85 percent of its revenue, which totaled $3.7 billion last year. Others will want to know how Facebook intends to fend off increasing competition from the likes of Google Inc, which is cultivating its own social network called Google+.

Also, corporate governance experts have called attention to the fact that Zuckerberg will retain disproportionate control over the company after it goes public.

The company has said it expects to trade under the ticker FB when it makes its debut as a publicly traded company, expected in mid 2012.

It looks like 2010 was indeed the year that Facebook’s success exploded.

For the first time ever, U.S. Web surfers visited the social networking site more than any other site in 2010, beating out Internet behemoth Google, according to a report from Hitwise, an Internet analytics firm.

Facebook, which had a flood of good and bad publicity last year, grabbed 8.93% of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010. Google, which had been in the top spot in 2009, slipped to the No. 2 position with 7.19% of all visits, Hitwise said.

The analytics firm also reported that Yahoo! Mail came ranked third with 3.52% of all visits, while the main Yahoo! site was fourth with 3.3%. YouTube rounded out the top five with 2.65% of all site visits.

Facebook had been creeping up on Google during the last several months.

While Google has long been at the top of the heap when it comes to grabbing the most visitors and time spent on a Web site Facebook began making its mark last summer.

In September, Online researcher comScore reported that for the month of August, Facebook edged out Google in terms of how much time U.S. users spent on a Web site. U.S. users spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, compared with 39.8 million minutes on Google’s various sites, including Google News and YouTube.

And last March, Facebook hit another milestone when the social networking site replaced Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week.

Hitwise reported over the weekend that Facebook marked another small victory for the year. After analyzing the top 1,000 search terms for 2010, Hitwise calculated that the word “Facebook” was the top search term for the year.

“This is the second year that the social networking Web site has been the top search term overall, accounting for 2.11% of all searches,” Hitwise reported. There actually were four variations of the term “Facebook” in the top 10 searched-for terms of 2010: facebook; facebook login; facebook.com, and www.facebook.com.

Other search terms making the top 10 include: Craigslist, Myspace, YouTube, eBay, Yahoo and Mapquest.

Hitwise reported four variations of the term “Facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for nearly 3.5% of searches overall.

The term “Facebook login” moved up from the ninth spot in 2009 to the second spot this year, Hitwise said. YouTube was the third most-searched term this year, followed by Craigslist, Myspace and Facebook.com. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.2% of the top 50 searches.

Facebook was the top-visited website for the first time in 2010, accounting for 8.9% of all U.S. visits between January and November. Google Inc.’s (GOOG) namesake website ranked second, followed by Yahoo Inc.’s (YHOO) Yahoo! Mail site, Yahoo, and Google’s YouTube.

Hitwise also reported Kim Kardashian was the personality that drew the most searches for the year, while Star Wars was the top movie draw and Lady Gaga was the most searched artist. In the sports category, Tiger Woods and the Dallas Cowboys topped the athlete and sports team searches, respectively.

Sales will more than double from 2009, said the people, who declined to be identified because the privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue. Facebook had $700 million to $800 million in sales last year, and the 2010 figure was previously expected to be closer to $1.5 billion, according to two other people familiar with the matter earlier this year.

Facebook’s more than half a billion users have made it an attractive target for advertisers, including Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Adidas AG. In October, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! Inc. when ranked by the number of global users, making it No. 3 behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia.

“The love affair of consumers with social networks is an abiding one,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. “All the big brands are there.”

Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, declined to comment.

Facebook, founded in 2004, would reach $2 billion faster than Yahoo and at almost the same pace as Google. Yahoo, founded in 1994, posted revenue of $1.6 billion in 2003 and $3.6 billion in 2004. Google, founded in 1998, reached $1.5 billion in 2003 and then $3.2 billion in 2004.

‘Person of Year’

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive officer, was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” yesterday. The publication noted his role in “creating a new system of exchanging information” and “changing how we all live our lives.”

Zuckerberg, 26, created Facebook for college students when he was a sophomore at Harvard University. After opening the site to people outside of higher education, the company surpassed News Corp.’s MySpace as the No. 1 social network two years ago. Facebook users now post a billion pieces of content, such as photos and messages, every day, Time said.

Facebook has maintained ad prices, even as its user growth creates a surge of space for commercial messages, the company said in August. Facebook also makes money from a credits program, which lets people buy virtual items in online games.

Figuring It Out

“People are learning and they’re figuring out how they can work with Facebook,” said Christian Juhl, a president at digital ad agency Razorfish, part of Paris-based Publicis Groupe SA. “You can prove success without a massive expenditure.”

Facebook is making gains in so-called display ads — the banners, videos and other graphical promotions that appear on websites. It may grab about 9.4 percent of that market in the U.S. this year, up from 6.6 percent in 2009, according to EMarketer Inc. in New York.

Yahoo, which leads the market, will have about 16.2 percent, down from 16.5 percent, the firm estimates. Google, which is stronger in Internet-search ads, may take 6.7 percent, up from 4.7 percent.

Facebook’s growth is also attracting investor interest. The company has a valuation of $43.1 billion, according to SharesPost Inc., an exchange for privately held stocks. That’s up more than 60 percent from three months ago and almost quadruple the level in March.

At the same time, Facebook’s expansion has increased concerns about privacy. After lawmakers and advocacy groups complained that it shares too much personal data, the company introduced simpler privacy controls in May and said it was reducing the amount of user information that’s publicly available.

“They’ve done a better job recently around privacy, which alleviates a lot of the concern,” Juhl said. “That’s something we’ll always have to keep watching. But that’s nothing new — whether it’s Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook.”
From:Bloomberg.com

Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.

The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones paints a slightly different picture to that of Internet use from computers. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28 percent) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.

Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released today from The Nielsen Company. Though the company did not give a breakup of the social networking sites, but considering the popularity of Facebook it is apparent where you spend most of your time.

The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.

Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks – accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent. Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online.

Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.

Portals remain as the second heaviest activity on mobile Internet (11.6 percent share of time), despite their double digit decline and social networking’s rise to account for 10.5 percent share means the gap is much smaller than a year ago (14.3 percent vs. 8.3 percent).

Other mobile Internet activities seeing significant growth include music and video/movies, both seeing 20 percent plus increases in share of activity year over year. As these destinations gain share, it’s at the cost of other content consumption – both news/current events and sports destinations saw more than a 20 percent drop in share of U.S. mobile Internet time.

“Although we see similar characteristics amongst pc and mobile internet use, the way their activity is allocated is still pretty contrasting, added Martin. While convergence will continue, the unique characteristics of computers and mobiles, both in their features and when and where they are used mean that mobile Internet behavior mirroring its PC counterpart is still some way off.”

1. Facebook
2. Amazon
3. Apple
4. Google
5. Huawei
6. First Solar
7. PG&E
8. Novartis
9. Walmart
10. HP
11. Hulu
12. Netflix
13. Nike
14. Intel
15. Spotify
16. BYD
17. Cisco Systems
18. IBM
19. GE
20. Disney
21. Gilt Groupe
22. Indian Premier League
23. PatientsLikeMe
24. Grey New York
25. BMW DesignworksUSA
26. Synthetic Genomics
27. FiLife
28. Frito-Lay
29. Alibaba
30. MITRE
31. HTC
32. Diller Scofidio + Renfro
33. Firstborn
34. Sportvision
35. Ideo
36. Samsung
37. Glam Media
38. Ngmoco
39. VNL
40. Aldi Süd
41. Fast Retailing
42.Huayi Brothers
43. Athenahealth
44. MVRDV
45. Alstom
46. Quantcast
47. Good Guide
48. Microsoft
49. Politico
50. Twitter