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Facebook's IPO is one of the biggest news stories of 2012 so far...are you up to speed? Here's an overview of the most important details of the IPO, from promising start to disappointing finish.

After abundant speculation and much anticipation, Facebook finally filed paperwork for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012, the same week the massive social network celebrated its 8th birthday. The S-1 revealed that Facebook had an estimated value of $100 billion and was hoping to raise $5 billion dollars, which would have made the company about four times as valuable as Google when Google went public in 2004.

Facebook filed with Morgan Stanley as lead underwriter, while Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and others took secondary positions. Shares were planned to hit the market in May 2012, but rumors soon began to fly that the IPO wasn't living up to the hype. Investors were skeptical about Facebook's prospects, as the site's ad revenues hadn't kept pace with its user growth. An investor poll conducted by Bloomberg found that 79% of investors, analysts, and traders thought that Facebook's $96 billion valuation was too high.

Facebook amended the S-1 filing several times, each time painting a bleaker picture of Facebook's future. One of the largest problems facing Facebook was the site's mobile versions. Facebook has yet to find a way to capitalize on its smartphone-based users, so the more users who check Facebook from their phones, the worse Facebook's average revenue per user (or ARPU) gets. Users are increasingly accessing Facebook from their mobile devices, meaning that Facebook's revenue is sinking.

After all the hysteria, the IPO's debut was anticlimactic. On its first day as a public company, Facebook's stock closed at $38.23 a share. That's down from the opening trading price of $42, but up from its IPO price.

Many theories attempt to account for the IPO's disappointing performance. One suggests that it's NASDAQ's fault, for failing to the stock until 11:30 am EST, 30 minutes later than planned. Another theory places the blame with GM, which pulled its advertising from Facebook shortly before the IPO because it wasn't working. Others say that Facebook was overvalued, or that investors are now weary of social media stock.

Whatever the reason, the rocky IPO cast doubts for many on Facebook's second-quarter revenue potential, and the doubts continue. After all the rumors and hype surrounding Facebook's IPO, what was billed as one of the biggest stories of the year became a non-story. There was little to tell, except that Facebook had underperformed.

In the weeks following the IPO, Facebook stock fell as low as low as $25.52. It is now around $28, but its future is still uncertain.

To find out if this social network can be a good way to meet new people for dating, please check out our review of Facebook.

The concept of purchasing virtual goods may not have been around for long, but it has now become one of the fast-growing types of business online. According to the Inside Virtual Goods report, the overall market for virtual goods in the US is on its way to hitting $2.9 billion in 2012 - that's up from $2.2 billion this year and $1.6 billion in 2010.

The virtual goods industry first exploded on Facebook with the popularity of games like FarmVille and CityVille, in which users purchase currency that can be used within the game. Facebook also added a virtual gifts feature that allowed users to buy and send gifts to one another.

Dating sites quickly picked up on the success of the virtual goods game. Plenty of Fish offers "Goldfish Credits" for purchase in packages of 100, 215, or 500. With Goldfish Credits, users can send gifts to other members or find out if someone has opened their messages. Gifts are publically posted on the recipient's profile for 3 three weeks before disappearing. Each Plenty of Fish member also receives 2 virtual roses when they join the site. Roses are sent when composing a message, but each rose may only be used once during a 30 day period. Because they are a rare commodity on the site, roses are considered an especially strong indicator of a user's interest.

HOT or NOT was also an early adopter of virtual goods. The site offered virtual roses ranging from $2 to $10 that could be sent to prospective dates. Though more expensive, the $10 roses became the most popular option because they sent the strongest signals to the recipient. HOT or NOT also found that the recipients of virtual gifts were four times more likely to respond to the sender than users who did not receive a gift.

To date, Zoosk is one of the biggest virtual goods success stories. Zoosk Coins are a virtual currency used to purchase a range of features on the site. According to the site's FAQ, Coins can be used to "purchase Gifts, arrange for a Special Delivery, receive a Delivery Confirmation for your email messages, and Boost your profile." Gifts are cute graphics, like flowers and pets, that can be sent to other members. Special Delivery alerts a message recipient with a pop-up when they have received a message from a user who has purchased the feature. Delivery Confirmation notifies the buyer when their messages have been read, and Boost is a feature that puts the purchaser at the top of someone's search results or in a special place on the homepage of other interested users.

Virtual goods seem poised to become more popular than ever on dating and social networking sites. It looks like your holiday shopping list just got a little bit longer.

For more on this story you can read TechCrunch. For information on the dating sites mentioned in this article you can read our POF.com review and our Zoosk.com review.

What effects does Facebook have on our romantic lives?

Online Dating University set out to find the answer, and produced a colorful infographic that shows us exactly what happens to our relationships when we live in public. Check it out here, via All Facebook.

Some interesting facts include:

• Approximately 60% of all Facebook users report a relationship status on their profile.
• The United States, South Africa, Iceland, the UK, and Canada are the five countries with the highest percentage of users reporting a relationship status.
• The average percentage of single Facebook users, by country, is 39%.
• Jordan is home to the largest percentage of Facebook users who list themselves as single on the site.
• The highest percentage of Facebook users who state that they're in a relationship of any kind (from "it's complicated" to "married") reside in Finland.
• Ghana has the greatest percentage of single male Facebook users, but women make up a greater percentage of Facebook's user base at large.
• As of December 2010, women outnumbered men on the site at a rate of 1.28 to 1.

2010, as it turns out, might not have been a great year for relationships. 37% of Facebook users changed their relationship status to "single" during the year, and 3% found themselves in relationships that were "complicated." 24% listed themselves as "in a relationship," while 5% became "engaged" and 31% were "married."

According to the infographic, documenting your love life on Facebook can have the following effects:

1. Overanalyzing. When you spend too much time on Facebook, you run the risk of becoming intensely aware of the activity on your love interest's profile. Over analyzing everything you see him or her post is likely to lead to feelings of insecurity.
2. Oversharing. What happens if you change your relationship status on Facebook but your partner doesn't? Publically recording every detail of your relationship can lead to unwanted confrontations and awkward moments, as well as public heartbreak if the relationship ends. Plus, future partners might not appreciate being privy to every detail of your past love affairs.
3. Unhealthy concern with the remarks of others. It's easy to become excessively concerned with the comments left by other people, and equally as easy to misinterpret harmless comments as competition. Unwarranted jealousy is a side effect of social networking for many Facebook users.
4. Constant reminders of lost love. Break ups are challenging at the best of times, but the access Facebook provides to your ex, and the constant reminders of his or her new life without you, makes the end of a relationship even more difficult.

How do you deal with these problems? Continue to Part II for Online Dating University's suggestions.

To find out more on how to use this social network as an online dating tool please read our review of Facebook.com.

A recent post from Markus, the owner of PlentyofFish.com, over on his blog commented on Mark Brooks view that free dating sites are going to kill off paid dating sites. It looks like Markus doesn't see that happening (which I agree) since he mentions the fact that the rankings for dating sites over the last few years have remained relatively stable.

What he did say is Facebook has been taking traffic from all dating sites. According to Markus, his Google Analytics account shows that page views per user (a free dating sites bread and butter since they make money on displaying ads) have declined 30 percent in the last 2 years. He also reported that PlentyOfFish.com's traffic increased by 15 percent on September 23 when Facebook went offline for 4 hours.

I was actually surprised to see Markus refute Mark Brooks in public like that since he was a client of Marks dating consulting business for a while a year or two ago. It looks like their working relationship may not have ended on a high note.

For more information on the online dating site mentioned in this article, read our review of PlentyofFish.com.

Facebook was down yesterday morning for about 2.5 hours. From around 9:30 AM eastern standard time to about 12:00 PM most people reported not being able to access Facebook. Most received a DNS failure message similar to this one:

Service Unavailable – DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

This was Facebook's longest outage in about 4 years and was the result of the database being overwhelmed by requests. This was due to a new software update that handled certain error conditions. The software update incorrectly found an invalid configuration value when someone connected to their Facebook account. This error would result in numerous queries to the database. When you times the number of database queries by the number of people who use Facebook everyday worldwide, this error quickly brought Facebook's database servers to their knees. The problem also compounded itself because, if the same person tried to visit Facebook again, the whole process would start over again.

To fix the problem, Facebook's engineering team had to shut down the site. Once the database servers stopped receiving requests the reason for the problem was discovered and then fixed. Once completed, Facebook then slowly allowed people back on the site and monitored the situation closely. The system that checks for errors in configuration values is turned off at the moment. Engineers are going over new designs for the system to make sure this problem doesn't happen again.

For more details on the problem Facebook experienced, read Robert Johnson Blog.

Almost 2 months ago Zoosk reported that their Facebook Fan page had over 1 million fans. I checked today and they currently have 1,612,923 Facebook Fans. Here is a YouTube video that Zoosk put together to mark the milestone.

That certainly is a large number of fans and the increase of 600 thousand fans in under 2 months is an achievement itself (that is roughly 10,000 Facebook Fans a day). This is by far the largest number of Fans any dating site has on Facebook. Two other popular online dating sites only have about 6,000 each.

For more information on this popular dating site, read our review of Zoosk.com.