Facebook's IPO in pictures

Facebook this week filed for its initial public offering (IPO). I focused on the financials (Facebook's IPO by the numbers) but it's worth noting that the filing included images too. Except for the one above, all the images you'll see in this gallery are directly from the SEC document.

Yes, the first image in Facebook's filing is essentially a list of four numbers. Still, it's interesting to note the ones Facebook chose to underline: monthly active users, Likes & Comments per day, photos uploaded per day, and friendships.

A digital display of the Facebook user community and the connections between users. On a blank background, the connections form a picture that approximates a global map.

Facebook even provided a brief history of the company. Tomorrow is the company's 8th birthday!

Facebook underlined that its service allows users to "share photos with their friends and family" plus that friends and family can "Like or Comment on the photos."

Users can control what they share and with whom they share it. For example, each time a user updates his or her status, he or she can choose to share with everyone, with all friends, or with a subset of friends that the user can customize.

Over time, people are consuming and creating more kinds of information at a faster pace across a broader range of devices. The growing volume of information makes it challenging to find meaningful and trusted content and to effectively make your voice heard. Facebook organizes and prioritizes content and serves as a powerful social distribution tool delivering to users what we believe they will find most compelling based on their friends and interests. Facebook’s social distribution enables users, Platform developers, and advertisers to share information with target audiences large or small.

Facebook offers the ability to reach a vast consumer audience of over 800 million MAUs with a single advertising purchase. For example, a movie studio seeking to increase awareness of an upcoming film release can reach a broad audience of Facebook users on the day or week before the film’s opening.

Websites can integrate with Facebook using simple social plugins such as the Like button or design more deeply integrated social experiences built around users and their friends. For example, by tapping into our rich social data, TripAdvisor connects users to their friends and shares relevant content about where their friends have traveled and where they would like to visit in the future. While on the TripAdvisor website, friends can discuss their travel plans and recommendations and build out personal profiles of places they have been.

Advertisers can use our analytics platform to track and optimize the performance of their campaigns in real time. Facebook ad analytics enable advertisers to gain insights into which ads were displayed and clicked on. These analytics help advertisers make modifications to their ad campaigns in order to maximize results. Advertisers with Facebook Pages can also view the number of users who Liked and Commented on their Page and a newly introduced metric, "People Talking About This," which shows how many stories about their brand are being created and shared.

The last image in the SEC filing is very fitting: it's a Thank You to all the Facebook users who made the social network as successful as it is. Thank you for viewing this gallery.

See also:

• How much is Facebook worth?
• Facebook's IPO by the numbers
• Facebook files for $5 billion IPO
• Mark Zuckerberg was planning to sell Facebook in July 2004
• Facebook has over 845 million users
• Facebook has over 425 million mobile users
• Warning: beware of Facebook IPO scams