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Twitter predicts Facebook's first closing day price

Early crowdsourced prediction puts end of day price for Facebook at $54. So the shares have a ways to go yet.

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Eric Mack Contributing Editor
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Eric Mack

The Facebook IPO is off and running on the NASDAQ exchange. When the social network's stock started trading under the ticker symbol FB just around 11:30 a.m. Eastern today, the first trades of the new stock came across at $42. About the same time, the crowd of prognosticators on Twitter were predicting the stock would end the day at $54.

That estimate comes from Facebookipodayclosingprice.com, a quick little hack put together by programmer James Proud and inspired by a suggestion tweeted by investor Chris Sacca.

As Facebook began trading, Proud's site was predicting an average closing price of $54, based on 2,251 predictions on Twitter. At that price, Facebook would have a total market valuation of $148 billion. That would be a nice one-day bump of $44 billion from the announced opening price of $38 a share.

Screenshot by Eric Mack / CNET

Among some of the notable predictions: Sacca himself predicts a closing price of $56, while John Perry Barlow of Grateful Dead and Electronic Frontier Foundation fame predicts the stock will close at a paltry $32. Ouch.

Within minutes of the start of trading, the price of Facebook began to fall. We shall see if the optimism of the Twitter crowd plays out or not over the next few hours.

CNET's complete coverage: Facebook's monster IPO

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