You Shouldn't Hate Facebook Like You Do Enron

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Writing for TheStreet makes me feel like I am part of a club. Or a dysfunctional family that somehow manages to function. That's how it was at most of the radio stations I worked at.

When you pull together a group of reasonably smart people with strong personalities, opinions and some quirks, you naturally end up with such an assemblage.

The best radio stations and digital platforms that specialize in news and opinion have the feel of a barroom. There's plenty of great conversation -- often serious, sometimes even deep. You learn from the bartender or the stranger sitting on the stool next to you. And there are characters. They add value, but they also entertain.

That's what we have here at TheStreet, particularly around battleground stocks. A club that hosts a whole slew of diverse personas and points of view, including those of the reader.

Consider Facebook (FB).

Tuesday on TheStreet, we had quite a mix of excellent articles on the stock, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Featured on the front page, you've got one guy (me) praising Mark Zuckerberg with a prediction that FB hits $100 by 2014, if not sooner. Going in pretty much the opposite direction, Eric Jackson (we never agree!) labeled Zuckerberg's conference appearance "lackluster". Meantime, Chris Ciaccia wondered why Facebook made scant mention of search in its S-1 filing.

Elsewhere on the site, there was TheStreet's Richard Saintvilus telling readers: Like It or Not, Facebook is Here to Stay. Just over a month ago, Saintvilus wrote the epic It's Not Enron, It's Facebook where he compared what Enron did to accounting to what Facebook did to IPOs.

Back in July, Robert Weinstein trotted out the one that always makes me want to order a mixed drink, Zuckerberg lacks the experience to be an effective CEO.

If we charged admission, that coverage would be more than worth the price of it.

Bullish. Bearish. Cynical. Indifferent. An expression of outrage.

Even before a few beers, I would argue loudly that Jackson, Ciaccia, Saintvilus and Weinstein are all crazy.

Facebook is not Enron. Zuckerberg and Facebook are not pathetically inept like Mark Pincus and Zynga (ZNGA). And the purpose of an S-1 filing is not to provide the competition with a blueprint of every single strategic intention ever brought up in a meeting.

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