(Insipid polls, intolerant vampires, and initial public offerings. What a great country!)

Hey, America’s youth! I have some good news! In these muddled, mixed-up, mixed message-filled times we live in, there’s still hope! And I mean ‘youth’ in a broad sense. Youth in general. Not you, over there sulking in the doorway, with your Goth eyeliner and all that impaled nose jewelry. But collectively speaking, there’s still hope!

Yes, young people, you too can eventually sup on success, armed with nothing but your own initiative and ingenuity, a little luck, and millions in inherited trust funds strategically positioned in off-shore banks! You too can face universal loathing and be branded “The One Percent” by whining hippie wannabes whose idea of intensive career planning is to sleep in the park, dye their hair purple, and defecate on police cars!

(Okay, to be fair, that’s not entirely true. They only dye parts of their hair purple.)

But I bring you today an assuring proof that the American Dream is still alive and kicking! And the best news is this – for you to dream the Dream, the same attainable, time-honored rules still apply:

Stay in school, stay out of prison
Build a website that caters to several hundred million insatiable egos and then sell it
Floss

The proof? Facebook! The world’s most popular hated website. Facebook – that ubiquitous online social platform that we all know and don’t love.

Yesterday, in case you missed the financial news, facebook went public. This instantly made its creators, and Bono, very rich, and prompted the clever investment analysts at Morgan-Freeman-Stanley-Clark-Adam-Smith-Barney-Rubble to immediately invest four billion dollars in MySpace.

The numbers are impressive, even to partly-purple people in tents. In just the first four minutes of its IPO, 100 million shares of facebook had been traded, mostly by Martha Stewart and members of the House Ethics Committee.

By the end of that first day, facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had some twenty billion dollars, prompting him to go buy a new wallet, and Brazil. As of right now, only twenty-eight people on Earth are richer than Zuckerberg, a guy who’s younger than most of my shirts. Twenty billion bucks – not bad for someone who can’t even drive after dark yet.

But what is it, exactly, that makes facebook so attractive to investors? To begin with, facebook is frugal; they didn’t even spring for a capital F.

Furthermore, facebook has 800 million users, aka ‘potential shoppers,’ all connected to each other by various likes, dislikes, and other dysfunctional emotional states. Imagine that – 800 million captive consumers. If facebook were a country, it would be the fifth largest country on Earth, and Ron Paul would be demanding that we get our troops out of facebook.

And now that facebook has gone public, vested advertisers will have access to highly targeted markets; some seriously narrow niches: take, for example, your discriminating vampire. As it turns out, facebook vampires can be quite clique-ish. They’re a lot like that famous golf club in Augusta GA where they hold the Masters, but with less plaid.

There are facebook groups for gay (or lesbian) vampires, Republican (or Democrat) vampires, vampire killers, vampire bikers, and, for all I know, suburban soccer mom vampires with fixed-rate mortgages who lease their Kia SUVs and take modest liberties on Schedule C deductions.

There are facebook groups for just about everything. And it’s these groups, these connections between consumers that makes facebook so tempting to marketers. If someone with hundreds of facebook ‘friends’ buys something, they may share that news with all those friends. And those friends may share with their friends, and those may share, and on and on until the product goes viral, becomes all the rage, and no self-respecting metrosexual vampire would be caught undead without it.

And facebookers will share. Believe me, they’ll share. They’ll share that they decided to buy that thing, and what they were eating at the time, and how it tasted LOL, and what they plan to eat later BTW, and that now they’re leaving to go buy that thing, they’re on the way, they’re almost there, and they almost drove past it cause they were updating their facebook status LOL. They’ll share until you want to hit ‘em with a golf club, or Ron Paul.

Facebook keeps track of how many ‘friends’ you have, a number which, for me, rises and falls as my friends rate my status updates, based on the following scale:

Stupid
More stupid
Way more stupid
Joe Biden

Today, for example, Facebook tells me I have almost 800 friends.

No, I don’t.

I don’t have 800 friends. I don’t even know 800 people. Heck, I don’t know 800 numbers. In fact, by my count, I know exactly fourteen numbers:

0 through 9
Less
More
Way more
Theater popcorn

Of course, now that investors are involved, one has to wonder how much longer facebook will be free to use. And imagine having to handle billing for 800 million irate customers! Will there be some furiously underfunded office somewhere, similar to my cable company’s Customer Service center? Some drab, concrete-block structure that’s intentionally difficult to find, even harder to find parking, and staffed by two angry, obese women using circa 1979 black-and-white computer terminals that are still damp after being bought in bulk at an auction held by a defunct Pakistani call center after a tsunami?

It could get tricky. After all, facebook users are a special breed, even before you factor in fanged transsexuals, the Pit Bull Awareness Coalition (yes, there is), and the Appreciation Centre for Cats That Look Like Hitler. (yes, there is)

Case in point: somebody recently held a facebook poll, asking people if they installed their toilet paper rolls in “Over” or “Under” mode.

Within the first hour, 13,148 people had actually taken the time to vote. And in a world like that, there’s only one thing left to say:

LOL.