What were you doing at 9:30 a.m. Eastern? You certainly weren’t ringing the NASDAQ’s opening bell as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was doing. But what Zuck did simultaneously is perhaps even cooler. 
 
 To celebrate the once-in-a-lifetime, historic moment, Zuckerberg posted a status update like no other to Facebook. 
 
 “Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others,” reads Zuckerberg’s Friday morning update (see screenshot to the right). 
 
 The unusual status update went live right as Zuckerberg rang the opening bell, which can only mean that the social network configured the update especially for today’s special occasion. To do so, engineers used Facebook’s Open Graph API, which lets developers create custom actions, like “read a book,” “listened to a song,” or, in this case, “listed a company.” 
 
 In fact, clever Facebook engineers actually “hacked” the NASDAQ button to post the update, goes the story told by David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook, on TechCrunch. 
 
 “We hooked up our hack to run at exactly the same time as Mark pushed the button to turn on the light and ring the bell. Then we attached a wire that hooks to the hack and into the headset jack of a cell phone,” Garcia said. “When the button was pressed, it sent a signal through the hack, and the phone got the signal that triggered the custom action through our Open Graph API, posting a story onto Mark’s Timeline. It worked.” 
 
 Facebook yesterday priced its shares at $38 apiece for a $104 billion valuation. The social network will raise $16 billion (up to $18.4 billion with its over-allotment option) in its long-awaited initial public offering on the NASDAQ later today. Shares are expected to begin trading around 11 a.m. Eastern today. ||||| On the eve of the largest technology IPO in American history, the company at the center of all the hoopla is celebrating in a geeky-chic style emblematic of its eight-year history. 
 
 Friday morning at 6:30 a.m. Pacific, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will ring the opening bell in a remote ceremony held at the social network’s Menlo Park campus. Up until that moment, thousands of Facebookers will be participating in an all-night employee hackathon designing and coding away on what could be come the next Facebook Timeline. And from the looks of photos already trickling out on Facebook, this is one party not to be missed. 
 
 Facebook kicked off its hackathon, Hackathon 31 to be exact, at 7 p.m. Pacific Thursday evening. A crowd of several thousand employees gathered in an outdoor make-shift arena in the middle of the campus’ corridor (the same place where the bell-ringing will take place) to watch Zuckerberg and senior staffers rally the troops for one final night pre-IPO hacking. Zuckerberg, as pictured below, was greeted with a standing ovation from the crowd. 
 
 Thursday afternoon, Facebook priced its shares at $38 apiece for a $104 billion valuation. The company will debut on the NASDAQ tomorrow under the “FB” ticker symbol and raise $16 billion (up to $18.4 billion with its over-allotment option) through its offering. 
 
 Tonight, however, Facebook celebrates its “Hacker Way” culture and, in the process, sends a message to Wall Street and the world that its focus will always be on building and shipping products. 
 
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– Facebook shares will go on sale at long last today, in the biggest tech IPO in US history—and Nasdaq is desperate to make sure nothing goes wrong. Facebook has set an initial price of $38 per share, meaning it will make some $16 billion on the sale. Trading will begin at 11am ET—an hour and a half after the rest of the market opens—to give brokers time to handle the deluge of orders, the Los Angeles Times reports. "It has to go off without a hitch," said the head of one consulting firm. "If this goes poorly, it will not just be a poor reflection on Nasdaq—it will be a poor reflection on the US market structure." Nasdaq has actually been practicing, using the dummy ticker ZWZZT to test out various scenarios. Facebook, meanwhile, marked the occasion with an all-night "hackathon," which began with Mark Zuckerberg getting a standing ovation from his employees, VentureBeat reports. Zuckerberg will follow up that long night by ringing the opening bell remotely this morning.