Employees weren’t popping champagne corks at company headquarters, at least not where anyone outside could see them. And locals had plenty to do -from finding a job to locating the next Facebook.

The company’s sprawling headquarters along the southern edge of San Francisco Bay was quiet except for security guards walking the parking lots, a dozen TV satellite trucks and an onslaught of reporters who were not allowed inside.

The morning began with a ceremony attended by a few dozen people in a courtyard in the center of campus known as Hack Square. Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell to start the Nasdaq Stock Market’s daily trading as chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Nasdaq executives and other employees looked on.

Afterward, employees tried to get back to business as usual. That is, building a company under immense pressure to meet shareholders’ expectations. To remind everyone not to get caught up in the hoopla, Facebook’s 2,000 employees were given t-shirts that read “Stay focused & keep hacking.”

Here’s the two rivals stack up, based on the latest available data:

ANNUAL REVENUE: Google, $38 billion; Facebook, $3.7 billion.

ADVERTISING REVENUE: Google, $36.5 billion; Facebook, $3.2 billion.

ANNUAL NET INCOME: Google, $9.7 billion; Facebook, $668 million.

Shares sold in an IPO are typically just a fraction of the total shares a company has issued. That’s why, at an IPO price of $38 per share, all of Facebook’s share give the company an initial market value of $104 billion.

More shares, known as an overallotment, have been set aside if demand is heavy. If they are all sold, the IPO will raise $18.4 billion.

Here are the rest of the top 10 Internet IPOs, according to Renaissance Capital, an IPO investment adviser:

Google Inc., IPO on Aug. 18, 2004, $1.67 billion raised.

Thilo Weichert, the data protection commissioner for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein says shareholders should be aware that if European privacy authorities have their way, “Facebook’s business model will implode.”

Weichert was quoted by German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday saying Facebook could be ordered to stop transferring user information to the United States.

Facebook’s IPO prospectus warns investors that its business is subject to “complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters” that could harm its business.

Weichert confirmed the accuracy of the quotes in an email.

Even if the company is Facebook.

When the social media company’s stock starts trading Friday under the symbol FB, buyer demand is expected to explode. At its initial offering price of $38 a share, the 8-year-old upstart is worth $104 billion. That’s more than such giants as Disney and Kraft.

The riches that will flow to the company and its early investors total nearly $16 billion.

As with any initial offering, Facebook’s IPO follows lots of negotiation – over price, paperwork, selling and buying. Here are some questions and answers about its public debut:

Instead of operating as a separate division, Yahoo’s commerce operations will operate within the company’s global media team.

Interim CEO Ross Levinsohn announced the decision in a memo sent Thursday to Yahoo Inc. employees. The move signals Levinsohn’s ideas for turning around the troubled Internet company differ from Thompson’s.

The reversal comes a month after Thompson created the consumer-commerce division to help revive Yahoo’s revenue growth.

Thompson stepped down from Yahoo last weekend after just four months on the job. His departure was triggered by the revelation that his resume included a college degree in computer science that he never received.

The settlement announced Wednesday in Los Angeles does not end the war between Activision and dozens of former “Call of Duty” developers who claim they have been cheated out of millions in bonuses for the game.

Activision had sought $400 million from Electronic Arts, claiming the company met secretly with Jason West and Vincent Zampella while they were still under contract to work on “Modern Warfare” projects.

No details on the settlement were revealed, with the companies releasing only a joint statement that they “have agreed to put this matter behind them.”

Activision fired West and Zampella in January 2010 after the release of “Modern Warfare 2,” and they formed a new company, Respawn Entertainment LLC, which is developing games for Electronic Arts. The pair sued Activision in March 2010 seeking more than $36 million in bonuses, but the Santa Monica, Calif., gaming company said the pair were fired for insubordination and handed over company secrets to Electronic Arts.

Below is a look at how the stocks of some recently public companies are faring. The companies are all loosely Internet-related, though their businesses vary widely.

- Yelp Inc., developer of online games, first day of trading on March 2, 2012

Pricing: $15 per share

First-day’s close: $24.58, up 64 percent from IPO price

Gartner said Wednesday that Samsung Electronics Co. sold 86.6 million cellphones in the first quarter, inching past Nokia Corp’s sales of just over 83 million units.

Apple Inc. sold 33 million iPhones, with a global market share of some 8 percent.

Last month Boston-based Strategy Analytics said Samsung had overtaken struggling Nokia as the world’s largest seller of cellphones by volume in the first quarter, grabbing a 25 percent global market share against Nokia’s 22 percent.

Both agencies have rated Nokia in third place in terms of smartphone sales behind Samsung and the iPhone.

Facebook said in a regulatory filing that 84 million shares, worth up to $3.2 billion, will be added to the offering.

The entire increase comes from insiders and early investors, so the company won’t benefit from the additional sales.

The biggest increases come from investment firms DST Global and Tiger Global. Goldman Sachs is doubling the number of shares it is selling. Facebook board members Peter Thiel and James Breyer are also selling more shares.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t increasing the number of shares he’s selling.