• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, February 2, 2012

“Is it just like in the movie?” Bloomberg’s Businessweek asks, then provides a gallery of “exclusive” pictures from inside Facebook headquarters that confirms that it’s pretty much like what you’ve probably imagined. The penultimate photograph is an ostrich-like stuffed bird astride a stuffed panda bear on a desktop -- an apt analogy, perhaps, of what would have seemed like a very unlikely coupling less than a decade ago: a bunch of 20-something kids hiring Morgan Stanley to underwrite an IPO to raise upwards of $5 billion for a “social network” that was dreamed up in a dorm room.

This morning, those dreams are manifested in a banner headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Facebook Sets Historic IPO,” itcrows. “Potential $10 Billion Offering Would Dwarf Google's; Site Has 845 Million Users.”

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg writes at the top of a letter to potential investors. “It was built to accomplish a social mission -- to make the world more open and connected.”

You can read the entire filing with the Security and Exchange Commission here.

The New York Times itself is running a funky file photo from 2005 of Mark Zuckerberg (28%), Dustin Moskovitz (4%), and Sean Parker (4%), who was then Facebook's president. On the walls are murals by David Choe, who at the time accepted shares instead of cash in payment. That sage decision is expected to yield more than $200 million, Nick Bilton and Evelyn M. Rusli report in the lede of their front-page story.

“It’s a big winner’s circle," they also report.

“Facebook will return insane amounts of money to the early stakeholders,” Alex Gould, a technology investor and instructor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, tells Bilton and Rusli. “Facebook is not just a fund-maker, it’s a firm-maker.”

Ad Age’s Cotton Delo does a concise job of tweaking out some of the key numbers in the filing.  Advertising was responsible for the lion’s share of Facebook's revenues last year -- $3.15 billion -- but it also earned $557 million from Facebook Payments –- “the virtual currency it began requiring game developers on the platform to use as of July 1 -- and other fees,” Delo reports. Facebook gets as much as a 30% cut on virtual goods purchased.

The ad revenues were less than expected, however, as several stories reported. A widely cited estimate had pegged Facebook's ad revenue for 2011 at $4.27 billion.

A few other factoids from Delo:

• COO Sheryl Sandberg's 2011 compensation: $31 million
• Daily likes and comments: 2.7 billion
• Age of oldest Facebook senior exec: 44

360i CEO Bryan Wiener sees a rosy future for brands and fans on Facebook: "As the integration between earned and paid media becomes tighter, brands are going to need to advertise more with Facebook to spark conversations and draw attention to the increasingly interesting experiences they're creating [within Facebook]," he tells Delo.

That said, they are starting from a low base. “Slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with the brands, according to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank,” Matthew Creamer reported in Age last week.

Those fans tend to be the heavy buyers “rather than the more casual shoppers that a brand needs to reach in order to grow,” but, writes Creamer, “this isn't all bad news. Facebook does provide good reach and its audience of loyal fans is good for market research and word-of-mouth advocacy.”

There are potential risks ahead, as there always are, Bloomberg’s Brian Womack reports. Facebook faces stiff competition from the likes of Google and Twitter, of course. Its mobile presence is minimal and devices running Apple iOS or Google’s Android OS may not be as friendly in the future. Regulatory pressure from the government always looms. And who knows who’s dreaming up what in a dorm room right now?

“Let me put it this way: If you go back to Google’s S-1 in their risk factors, there’s no mention of Facebook,” Kevin Landis, the portfolio manager for the Firsthand Technology Value Fund, tells Womack.

Then there’s the question of whether employees, soon to be awash in their newfound riches, will stay on task.

“People familiar with Mr. Zuckerberg's thinking said he has long been fearful of the damage an IPO could do to the company's culture,” Shayndi Rice reports in the Wall Street Journal. “He wants employees focused on making great products, not the stock price, they said.”

Indeed, one of the shots in the Bloomberg’s Businessweek gallery is of a urinal with the word “focus” affixed to the wall at what would normally be eye level. This morning, though, I imagine, most Facebook employee’s imaginations are floating several miles above the level at which the rest of us see the world.