Facebook $FB the most exciting IPO I have watched unfold.

It is another nail in the coffin for the future of Wall Street research. All the experts on the topic of social graphs, the social web, the mobile mobile and the internet are outside the walls of Wall Street and the metrics that matter will be conceived by the masses on Twitter, Stocktwits and Facebook.

Facebook is going to raise $15 (fifteen) billion from the public. As a frame of reference, $GOOG has about $47 billion in the bank and $58 billion.

Microsoft raised something like $50 million from their IPO. They did so with over 300 banks on the sales book. With Facebook, the $15 billion will be raised with less than 5.

Yes, times have changed.

This morning I woke up to find $FB trending on Stocktwits in my inbox and on our iPhone app and website (despite the fact that it is not yet public). The best research is coming from friends of mine on the web, who live with the product 24/7. The irony of Wall Street profiting from the IPO when they can’t even use the product within the bank firewall’s is upsetting, but I look at it as a fading symbol.

All of a sudden, the whole twittersphere is the best analyst on the subject of the biggest IPO in history. All of a sudden, by just linking a twitter account to a stocktwits account and tagging Facebook $FB, Stocktwits can aggregate and curate a whole new crop of amazing social web, and mobile web analysts who run companies and share insights from a global prespective 24/7/365.

An amazing post from my partner Phil Pearlman on the ‘false truths’ of Social Finance.

Watch Jon Steinberg talk about the ‘share it’ vs ‘search it’ world we now live in.

Read this great post from Peter Pham on Facebook as a Passport.

Robert Peck’s deep dive on Facebook upside potential Here is a link to his Stocktwits stream which is a must follow.

TechMeme (been reading for 5 years) continues as a top 5 place for the most interesting technology research/news the biggest public companies in all of tech.

Facebook is democratizing so many things. Twitter followed suit. AngelList, TechStars and Kickstarter are accelerating the trend. Now on Stocktwits, the best voices related to the new public and non public ‘technology’ companies can be discovered as people adopt the $FB language.

Let’s keep tagging and sharing and please link up your Stocktwits account to your Twitter account so your $(ticker symbol) mentions make it to our large community to be read and shared throughout the deep vertical of finance.