As we pointed out earlier, one of the tech stocks that got hit the hardest during the Facebook IPO hoopla was Zynga.

The company’s stock started off the day down 13.3% and ended the day down 13.42%. As Facebook officially went public today, the free-fall began for Zynga, causing a “circuit breaker” to kick in and halt trading when a stock drops more than 10%. Once it started up again, it was halted almost immediately.

Many have come up with their own theories on why this happened, including the thought that people were simply using Zynga as a proxy bet until Facebook became public. Once it did, they moved their money from one to the other, causing Zynga to tailspin.

Here’s how the day ended:

It will be interesting to see how things go next week for tech companies, as Groupon and LinkedIn also took hits today.

Facebook on the other hand ended up nearly exactly at the number set for its IPO, $38.

There’s no doubt about it, Zynga relies heavily on Facebook to make its games successful. Is it crazy to think that the company could acquired by the social network at some point? It makes sense to me.

Check out this one, called Facebook Made More Money Than…, which is accumulating all of the things that Facebook made more money than today. You can even submit your own.

My personal favorite? 66 sets of Winklevoss twins.

Simply click the arrow on the timeline and enter your own answer and source link:

By the end of the day, it’ll be interesting to see how many submissions the site can get and how creative all of you can be. Go get in on the action!

➤ Facebook Made More Money Than…

Its stock (ZNGA) dropped over 13% and trading has been halted.

Since Zynga’s gaming business relies heavily on Facebook as a distribution platform, those who are reacting to Facebook’s jump out of the gate could have something to do with the drop. This could also simply be a wave of tech investors dropping one company and moving their money over to Facebook.

In regards to the trade halting, it’s more than likely due to a “circuit breaker” mechanism that’s in place to stop the free-fall of a stock, adopted after the crash in May 2010.

These pauses in trading usually last about five to ten minutes, but Zynga has passed that threshold at this point as it was officially halted at 11:37AM ET.

UPDATE: Zynga trading resumed at 12:29PM ET at $7.80, but quickly halted again.

UPDATE 2: Zynga has started trading again and sits at $7.49 as of 1:42PM ET.

Facebook plans to halt taking orders for its record initial public offering (IPO) two days ahead of schedule, and perhaps even tomorrow after the markets close in the United States, a well-informed little birdie told Bloomberg.

Bloomberg ruffled some feathers last week when it reported that Facebook’s IPO has generated weaker-than-expected demand from institutional investors to date.

Facebook is seeking a valuation from $77 billion up to $96 billion based on its $28 to $35 per share price range. If it stops taking orders for the IPO tomorrow, following roadshows carried out last week across the United States, that would be two days ahead of its initial deadline date of May 17 according to Bloomberg data.

The shares will be listed on NASDAQ under the symbol ‘FB’. The social network giant currently serves over 900 million monthly active users (MAUs) in total, of which over 240 million are based in Europe.

Also see: Facebook’s IPO may be delayed due to pending SEC approval of its S-1

According to CNBC, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg won’t be making the trip to NYC for the grand celebration that is the IPO stock listing and bell ringing ceremony, set for next Friday, May 18th.

ALERT: Zuckerberg planning to stay at Facebook HQ when stock lists; Facebook considering dual-coast bell ringing for next Friday – sources

— CNBC (@CNBC) May 11, 2012

If this is true, it seems very appropriate that Zuckerberg would opt to stay back in Menlo Park with the rest of his company during the epic moment. Either way, I hope that he’s wearing a hoodie.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that this will be the moment when Facebook announces that it has reached the 1 billion user mark.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, but have yet to hear back.

UPDATE: We’ve heard back from Facebook and a spokesperson told us:

We don’t have a comment at this time.

Ohanian, whose thoughts are very respected in the tech community, had some interesting insight into how Mark Zuckerberg might have to change his ways once the company goes public. It’s an interesting clip, so definitely have a look:

CISPA recently passed the House and is awaiting review by the Senate. President of the United States, Barack Obama is said to be willing to veto the bill if necessary.

Check out our interview with Alexis Ohanian from this year’s TNW conference, as well as his keynote speech.

Here’s what you need to know about CISPA

Clearly, someone’s excited about Facebook’s upcoming IPO:

Facebook flag in front of JP Morgan. instagr.am/p/KNobEoxJXt/

— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 4, 2012

A few of us here at The Next Web are wondering if the Facebook flag is flying higher than the US flag, which of course would violate some sort of code. Well, this one to be exact:

United States Code. Title 4, Chapter 1

No other flag or pennant should be placed above or, if on the same level, to the right of the flag of the United States of America, except during church services conducted by naval chaplains at sea, when the church pennant may be flown above the flag during church services for the personnel of the Navy. No person shall display the flag of the United Nations or any other national or international flag equal, above, or in a position of superior prominence or honor to, or in place of, the flag of the United States at any place within the United States or any Territory or possession thereof: Provided, That nothing in this section shall make unlawful the continuance of the practice heretofore followed of displaying the flag of the United Nations in a position of superior prominence or honor, and other national flags in positions of equal prominence or honor, with that of the flag of the United States at the headquarters of the United Nations.

It’s not like we live in the “United States of Facebook”. Or do we?

One of the companies paying close attention to the Facebook IPO is San Francisco based Twitter. Having launched in 2006, the company is starting to mature itself in the same way that Facebook has over the past two years, business wise.

With Dick Costolo on board as Twitter’s CEO, the company is making a bee-line for media partnerships and advertisers, growing out the amount of sponsored content on the site rapidly.

During an interview with CNBC today, Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley shared that the company isn’t thinking about an IPO right now:

Benchmark’s @bgurley: Twitter is not thinking about IPO

— CNBC (@CNBC) February 3, 2012

Gurley and Benchmark are investors in Twitter, and his remarks are certainly timely, given that Facebook is now in its quiet period awaiting its public offering. While Twitter might not be thinking about going public at the moment, it is certainly watching how everything goes with Facebook’s attempt to raise $5B.

How it all goes for Facebook is extremely important to Twitter and its investors, as it will be the first real test of how a social property used by millions to connect with one another is received in the open market.

Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders gave us insight on how the company will position itself for years to come. Zuckerberg mentioned Facebook’s impact on the economy and how connecting people with businesses is important for global economic growth. Those are the types of visions that publicly traded companies have to have, and it will be interesting to watch Twitter grow up and take hold of its own grand vision and path to revenue.

When it comes to vision, Twitter is in a good spot by having Jack Dorsey back in the mix as Chairman. He’s always been the one who sees Twitter as something much more than micro-blogging. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a letter from Dorsey accompanying an S-1 filing one day.

You may be tired of all of the Facebook chatter and stats after the company filed its S-1 paperwork to go public yesterday. Whether you’re FB’d out or not, this might get your attention.

Hitwise has pulled some really powerful stats about Facebook’s first month of 2012, and it’s really impressive stuff.

Ready for this?

• Facebook.com captures one in every eleven Internet visits in the US
• 1 in every 5 page views occurs on Facebook.com
• The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes
• “Facebook” is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks.
• Facebook.com users are highly loyal to the website; 96% of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012

These are absolutely astronomical numbers and facts, especially the bit about 1 in every 5 page views occurring on Facebook. What these stats tell us is that the News Feed and Ticker changes the company has introduced at the F8 conference are working and keeping people on the site as they are intended to do.

For example, by sharing what you’re listening to on Spotify with all of your friends without having to click a button means that everyone is interacting more by doing even less. With all of that extra time, you’re now discovering new content and spending more time on Facebook.

The scary part is that as more people start setting up their Timeline on Facebook, the time on site will increase even more. I personally haven’t been going back and filling out life events from the past, but I’ve seen others doing it by ways of posts on my News Feed. If that trend continues, people will literally spend hours of their time just giving Facebook every piece of data they have on themselves.

If you were wondering why the company could be worth upwards of $100B, now you know.

Today, Facebook filed its S-1 paperwork to take the company public, and along with the filing came a letter from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the letter, Zuckerberg discusses how important the connections that his company is making are. Along with social connections, Facebook’s CEO points out that connecting consumers to businesses can have a big impact on the global economy:

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

Of course most people won’t put down a lot of money to invest in a company that lets you poke your friends, so the company mission will start to become clearer as we get closer to May, when the company will start being publicly traded. It’s no accident that Facebook is starting to sound more like a grown-up company than ever before. Connecting the world is no small task, and Facebook hopes that its $5B IPO will help them get there.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s letter in its entirety:

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.