Facebook, the "other" MySpace, has put itself up for sale. Is its timing good for the price it's asking, or merely avarice gone wild?

Facebook is the social networking site for students, and had recently put itself on the block and quickly turned down an offer of $750 million, maintaining it is seeking an amount somewhere in the rich neighborhood of $2 billion.

That's a number with too many zeroes for a company that's barely 3 years old, created by a group of students from Harvard University, but if you'd like to have whatever the founders are smoking for coming up with such a number, you'll have to wait in line, because apparently, everyone and their dogs are jockeying for a piece of that pie.

The company may not necessarily be pitting media giants (and their egos) with each other, but the likes of Viacom are in the wings, with pundits touting how it could be a good fit, especially after Viacom is looking more like a company with its pants down lacking a truly viable Internet strategy after its nimble nemesis NewsCorp snatched up a wide array of golden Internet properties like MySpace, IGN and a host of others barely weeks before traffic to such sites skyrocketed.

Facebook has other good reasons to play hard to get, having become the seventh most trafficked site on the Internet, more than even Amazon.com and WaltDisney.com. What's more, they're on top of a youth market that are among the most coveted demographic in any ad executive's wet dream, one made up of high school and college students, with a site sporting a more controlled atmosphere than at the house of rival MySpace.

But there are also good reasons why rebuffing the current offer could result in another example of judgment mired in blind hubris. Industry gossip rag Vallewag even has a witty insightful take on why Facebook's chances of netting $2 billion are slim at best.

But one does have to work that fine balance between greed and extracting the best value out of an item, especially when it is at its peak. After all, it wasn't too long ago that Intermix Media, the company that owned über-community MySpace, was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp to the shock and awe of industry watchers for the hefty price tag north of half a billion dollars.

If that seemed too much then, such notions were quickly dispelled when the co-founder of Intermix sued the company for being unable to extract maximum value from the sale, citing the price tag was too low considering how the social networking site's statistics ballooned after the acquisition to numbers that would make even statisticians weep.

Of course, there's the press effect of seeing its numbers grow after all that coverage in the purchase descended on the company; but regardless, Gordon Gecko's "Greed is Good" ethos makes no such discounts nor compromises, and they see many millions more that can be potentially squeezed from the sale.

Now for Facebook, with founders who are Harvard alumni after all, only time will tell if such a decision was prudent, if turning down the $750 million "bird in the hand" is worth more than the $2 Billion in the bush.

You need not look further for good reference than the ill-fated PointCast, the first Web bubble's darling of news provision that at its height drank their own Kool-aid and spurned a $350 million offer from (guess who) NewsCorp, only to see its industry, and stock, tank very quickly thereafter.

If it succeeds, its face will be the poster child of the new net generation as well as a classic business case in the Negotiation 101 book. But if it tanks, well, it'll just have to find a way to save face.

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