Why Glenstrata puts Facebook on its mettle for investors Indeed, the very addictiveness of the social networking experience suggests the lukewarm assessment of Facebook's ability thus far to turn its 800m users into meaningful recurring revenues may be pessimistic or premature. Compared with the baseless projections that underpinned so many dot.com floats last time round, Facebook's $3.2bn of advertising revenues make it look like a proper business, albeit one providing a fairly shaky support for a valuation of almost 30 times sales. Never in history can a company seriously have claimed to reach, sometimes daily, one in eight of the world's population. This does not guarantee that Facebook will provide a good outcome for new investors. The experience of MySpace and Bebo shows how flimsy the bond between the company and its users might be. To justify today's valuation, Facebook will have to find multiple revenue streams and develop a more reliably robust relationship with its users. Mark Zuckerberg's continuing control over more than 50pc of the votes, moreover, suggests that this will always be a private fiefdom dressed up as a publicly-quoted company. I suspect the artist who took shares for painting a mural at Facebook's office in 2005 will remain its most successful outside investor. The combination of Glencore and Xstrata looks at first blush like a much more interesting proposition, creating as it does a completely new type of fully integrated mines-to-market commodities group. Whether the suggested benefits of pushing greater volumes of Xstrata's metals production through Glencore's trading platform add up to the hundreds of millions of pounds a year that some analysts are suggesting remains to be seen, but the risks are quite different from, and I think lower than, Facebook's. It is unlikely that the market for the company's coal, copper, nickel and zinc will simply disappear. And while I haven't a clue what social networking will look like in 10 years" time, I'd happily bet that we will still be digging metals out of the ground and selling them to the Chinese a decade from now. The challenges facing Xstrata and Glencore are more prosaic and less existential, like making a success of crunching together different corporate cultures, albeit these are two companies that already know each other well. What is certain is that over the next few years either Facebook or Glenstrata will turn out to be a much better investment than the other. I have an old-fashioned view that the most important determinant of an investment's ultimate success is the price paid at the outset, and for that reason I know which of the two I feel more confident about. Whether I am right or wrong, though, it is a nice change to be kicking the tyres at the micro, stock-picking level. You never know, picking the right shares might start to matter again. Tom Stevenson is an investment director at Fidelity Worldwide Investment. The views expressed are his own.