I really wish that the title of the above post wasn’t merely a snarky way to call attention to the fact that with hedge fund investment deals like the ones Twitter and Facebook are touting, we’re back to the good old days of irrational tech exurberance. I suppose if it were true, I wouldn’t be typing but would instead be happily playing my absurdly large collection of vintage Stratocasters and D’angelico New Yorker archtops through my vintage Fender Twin amps in our chateau in the Loire valley.

Guitaristic dreams aside, we seem to be back into an interesting of period that recalls the halcyon days of the Dot Com Bubble 1.0. Back then, the glorious days of new-car-smelling Porsche Boxsters, spiffy leather jackets and brand-new bulky cell phones, you didn’t have to prove any piffling details like how much profit you made in order for your company to be worth bazillions of dollars. You even got to say things like, “We’re the company of the future, although we are still searching for a business model.”

Ah, the good ol’ days of making $75,000 just for knowing how to spell “HTML.”

Facebook’s interesting new “valuation” at $50 billion is raising the eyebrows of a few people who understand the basics of how a company’s value is typically computed. So says William Cohen in the New York Times:

Last August, Facebook was valued at $27 billion and now it’s $50 billion — for a company with a reported $2 billion in revenue and negligible profits. If General Electric, with 2010 revenue of around $150 billion, traded at a similar multiple of revenue, it would be worth $3.75 trillion instead of $200 billion. Facebook is now considered to be worth more than Time Warner, DuPont and Goldman’s rival Morgan Stanley.

Something is definitely up. This is why we were intrigued to discover that there is actually more IPO deal activity now than during the late 90s!

Can I have a Porsche Boxster please?