Friday The 13th Myspace Comments

A GOOD INVESTMENT? Not to this investor. He sees trouble ahead for the latest ...

(NATIONAL) -- So, you’ve got it all figured out. Facebook, on the verge of announcing a public stock offering which could put its value at over a $100 billion – that is BILLION with a B – is going to be the hot ticket to your ship coming in.

Buy a few hundred shares, sock em' away, let the brew simmer and not only will your kids college educations be paid for, you’ll repair every bit of damage done to your 401K retirement plan thanks to that nasty Great Recession and to boot you’ll be living the high life.

But will it go down that way?

Or will Facebook, in the end, be just one of a long line of briefly shining Internet players that everyone seemed to think would be the next Microsoft or HP?

And how many have been in that distinguished line of players?

Remember the dot.com bust?

· Boo.com, spent $188 Million in investor money in just six months in an effort to create a “global online fashion store.” It went belly up May 2000.

· theGlobe.com – Was a hot (hot!) social networking service that went live in April 1995. It made even hotter news by going public in November 1998 and posting the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date.

As an article in Salon on August 22, 2001 put it: “Stephan Paternot was one of those dot-com 20-something wonder boys that the other 99.99 percent of the population loved to envy during the boom. On the first day of theglobe.com's ludicrous IPO, the Cornell grad with the chiseled good looks was worth $97 million.

On the Friday the 13th in November 1998 that the company went public, its stock price recorded a one-day rise higher than any other market debut in history…theglobe.com, now (2001) having closed its doors, has suffered the sorry fate of so many of its Net brethren, and the co-founder's claim to be an Internet whiz kid and entrepreneurial prodigy has sunk out of sight along with the company, as has most of his tens of millions.

As Paternot recently told SmartMoney.com: “He may make more money on the book and the movie version of his personal story about the company than from the company itself.”

The Salon story is an interesting piece. You can find it here

Or how about these one time smart money buys?

· Startups.com was said to be the "ultimate dot-com startup." Went out of business in 2002.

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