What is it with American A list tech bloggers and Facebook?

As Umair Haque notes, the level of reasoned discourse on Facebook has pretty much gone out the window recently.

Facebook - a $100 billion company ? Plentyoffish - a $1 billion company?

Did a haze of vapor cocaine descend on the Valley this morning? The value of Facebook just went up by...uhhh...an order of magnitude*...in two days? Are you kidding?

Look: let's all please take a deep breath.

Let's realize that gigantic valuations are not the same thing as real, durable, value creation.

In fact, the more we drink the kool-aid, the more we're actively helping the people who are only in it for a quick buck.

I think that we should all try being just a wee bit more critical of the businesses we're looking at and talking about. This means you, journalists, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, and of course, the relentlessly breathless TechCrunch (ex Erick Schonfeld, who is still writing like a champ).

(Some wags are already renaming TechCrunch as FaceCrunch I note....and even Valleywag is not its usual admirable caustic self)

After reading all the hullabaloo in the last few days what I don't "get" is what is driving the mass drinking of the snake oil (sorry, kool aid) around FaceAds. After all, the concept of Ads + Cookies + (vaguely true) user input demographic data has been around quite a while, as has MySpace, so this isn't exactly new new stuff, and nor is it surefire to succeed. But that seems to be have been buried in the rush to praise....

Patrick's First law states that the most likely explanation is the most cynical, so one assumes the blogulation is to get the traffic (as is this post of course ) but the Facehype is getting so extreme that I think Umair may be right, and a cloud of something has descended on the Valley. Maybe the air in bubbles is mildly hallucinogenic

Or perhaps there is a Tipping Point when the wisdom of crowds turns into the madness of crowds?

Or maybe they're all hoping that Facebook will remember and distribute a few stock options as shill for some of the swill being written

Shurely Not !!!

Still, Google has now announced it has a new toy too, so I guess they'll all rush off in that direction now for a bit and give poor Facebook's PR team a breather.....

* Broadstuff Note - thats on top of the existing 100 x revenue valuation....must be an IPO in the offing then