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There are plenty of reasons to "like" Facebook, but Internet IPOs are better known for their epic flops than wild successes.

Of the 31 Internet IPOs held since the beginning of 2011, 22 are currently trading below their closing price on the day they went public. Here’s an even scarier stat: 16 are trading below their offer price.

After popping by a collective 34% on IPO day, those 31 stocks are now trading at an average of just 8% above their offer prices. Excluding LinkedIn () and Zillow (), which are trading at more than double their offering prices, the rest of the Internet IPO list is collectively up by just 2%.

Generalizing across more than two dozen Internet companies is tricky, because they all have different business models, but the trend has been quite consistent: Internet IPOs get a nice bounce on day one of public trading, then slide off in subsequent days and weeks.

That’s the environment in which Facebook () is offering its shares to the public. The social network will sell about a fifth of its shares on Thursday. Those early buyers can begin reselling their shares on the Nasdaq exchange on Friday.

"It’s hard to say exactly what’s going to happen with Facebook, but from what we’re hearing on the demand side of things, I wouldn’t expect Facebook to do anything out of the ordinary in terms of beating this trend," says Nathan Drona, analyst at ABR Investment Strategy. "There will be an initial bump, but then the time to exit is at the strength of that rise."

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 and Drona expects shares to surge as high as $50 before eventually falling back to a range of $31 to $33.

Related story: 10 big dot.com flops

The bump-and-slide trend is caused by investors’ initial enthusiasm during IPOs — which eventually gets replaced by an examination of the companies’ business fundamentals.

Wall Street analysts remain concerned about Facebook’s slowing growth, weak ad sales-per-user numbers and lack of monetization of its mobile products.

Stephan Paternot, founder of 1990’s dot-com poster child theGlobe.com, knows a little about what Facebook is getting itself into.

TheGlobe Business Card Holders.com was a pioneering Internet community, and its November 1998 IPO generated an investor frenzy. On its first day of trading, the stock had one of the biggest IPO surges in history, soaring by 606%.

The never-profitable company never again traded as high, and was out of business within five years.

"Unfortunately, our run-up on IPO day meant we left $200 million to $300 million on table and raised only $30 million," Paternot told CNNMoney this week. That’s a problem underwriters are supposed to guard against: Because companies get cash only for the shares they sell directly, they don’t profit when IPO buyers resell their shares for huge gains.

"The positive side was it created a branding event — by the end of the day, everyone had heard of theGlobe," Paternot recalls. "But when every institutional investor flipped it the next day, the stock went down, and everyone thought there was something wrong with us."

The current Internet IPO trend is starting to echo the 1990’s dot-com bubble.

The most famous example from go-go days is VA Linux, a PC company whose shares jumped 698% in its first day of trading — still a U.S. record, according to Dealogic. That stock also never traded higher than on its IPO day, falling from $239 all the way down to $8.47 a year later.

Though their fall hasn’t been nearly as epic, two of last year’s super-hyped IPOs — Groupon () and LinkedIn — have also never yet returned to the highs they reached on their IPO days.

The companies received bullish headlines when their IPOs popped: Groupon rose 31% and LinkedIn shot up 109% on their first days of trading. But the sentiment turned sour once their shares started slipping.

Though he believes Facebook’s long-term potential is strong, in the near-term, Paternot thinks the bump-and-slide serves as a harbinger of things to come for Facebook.

"Facebook is as over-hyped and inflated as a company going public can be," he says. "All that company can do is slide down in the next six to nine months." 

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Google’s self-driving car got its license this week as the state of Nevada became the first in the nation to license the company’s vehicles.

And while a computer-driven car may seem unsettling, the technology represents a potential leap forward in auto safety.

More than 30,000 people are killed each year in crashes despite huge advances in auto safety. The overwhelming majority of those crashes are caused by human-driver error.

Computer driven cars could reduce traffic deaths by a very significant degree, said David Champion, head of auto testing at Consumer Reports, but only if all cars are computer-driven.

"I think if all the cars were self-driving, it would be a benefit," he said. "I think a mixture would be a bit chaotic."

That’s because humans are better at predicting the behavior of other humans than computers could ever be, he said.

"When I’m approaching an intersection, I look to see of the other driver is looking at me," said Champion. "If he’s looking somewhere else and inching forward, I’m going to lift off the gas."

For the foreseeable future, human "drivers" will continue to bear the ultimate responsibility even in Google’ (, Fortune 500)s self-driving cars. This means you won’t be able to lounge in the back seat and check email on your way to work. You’ll still have to sit in the driver’s seat and pay attention.

Self-driving cars, like Google’s, use sensors to watch cars, pedestrians and other obstacles. They combine a number of technologies that are already available on cars today — including GPS tracking, wheel motion sensors and radar — with additional technology and sophisticated software that allow the car to read street signs and signals and actually drive itself through traffic.

Google’s cars, modified Toyota Priuses, are still in the testing stages and aren’t available to the public. But some so-called "driver assistance" technologies are already helping to lower traffic deaths in cars you can buy now.

Electronic Stability Control which uses computers to help drivers maintain control during abrupt maneuvers, has been shown to reduce fatal crashes by as much as a third.

Cars of the future: They’re going to be tiny and weird

ESC is now required on all new cars but was first used, on a wide scale, on SUVs. That’s why, last year, statistics showed top-heavy SUVs to be less prone to roll over in real-world crashes than regular cars.

Beyond that, there are various other "driver assistance" technologies.

Blind spot alerts warn drivers of cars in adjacent lanes and forward collision alerts sound an alarm when a driver is closing in too quickly on a car ahead payday loans in one hour.

"We’ll start seeing more features that will migrate from just these alerts and warnings to taking a little more control," said John Capp, director of active safety technology at General Motors (, Fortune 500).

GM’s new Cadillac XTS, for instance, will brake automatically if a driver fails to respond to an imminent collision. Nissan’s () Infiniti division has a several models that provide slight braking to nudge a vehicle back into its lane if it begins to drift out.

Many luxury cars are now also available with "active cruise control" that allows a car driving at highway cruising speeds to automatically maintain a safe following distance behind the car ahead. In some models, these systems can work even in stop-and-go city traffic.

Systems like these could be helpful, said Champion, but also present the possibility of over-reliance or abuse.

"It all comes down to the person behind the wheel using the system," he said.

Sometimes these systems can cause confusion. For instance, some reports of unintended acceleration in Toyota cars were triggered by drivers failing to understand how an "active cruise control" system worked.

With these systems, drivers set the active cruise control to a certain speed. If there’s a slower car ahead, the cruise control will automatically slow the vehicle down to maintain a safe distance between the two cars. Once the slower car moves away, active cruise control will accelerate to the higher preset speed. This acceleration can be startling to drivers unfamiliar with the system.

There is at least some evidence, however, that "driver assistance technologies" do work. A recent study by the Highway Loss Data Institute, an insurance industry group, indicated that the forward collision avoidance system in the Volvo XC60 helped reduced accident claims by 27%. Volvo’s system warns the driver of an impending collision and applies the brakes if the driver takes no action.

One technology the Google car doesn’t utilize, but which would help make self-driving cars much more effective, Champion said, is vehicle-to-vehicle communication. So called V2V communication uses transmitters to send and receive signals that tell other cars where each car is, where it’s headed and how fast it’s moving. The devices can also communicate with transmitters along the road.

V2V is already in advanced stages of development by a consortium of automakers and the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. 

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Francois Hollande, who defeated French President Nicolas Sarkozy to become the first Socialist in 17 years to control Europe

A disgruntled Yahoo shareholder questioned the qualifications and integrity of recently hired CEO Scott Thompson after exposing a misrepresentation about the executive’s education.

The fabrication confirmed Thursday by Yahoo Inc. gives New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb more artillery as he tries to topple a board of directors favored by Thompson, who became CEO of the troubled Internet company four months ago.

Loeb, whose fund Third Point owns a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo, gained more leverage when he discovered Thompson doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree in computer science from a small college in Easton, Mass., as Yahoo stated in a regulatory filing last week.

Thompson only has an accounting degree from Stonehill College, an accomplishment that Yahoo also listed in the filing. The accounting degree was the only one listed in Thompson’s resume last year by eBay Inc. when he was still running that company’s PayPal payment service. He graduated in 1979, according to Stonehill’s website.

Yahoo confirmed Thompson’s credentials had been exaggerated in the recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., brushed off the distortion as an “inadvertent error.”

But Loeb pounced on the misinformation as a violation of Yahoo’s code of ethics and called for an independent investigation to determine whether Thompson had misled the company’s board about his technology credentials. He also cited the mix-up as an example of Yahoo’s poor corporate governance.

“If Mr. Thompson embellished his academic credentials we think that it 1) undermines his credibility as a technology expert and 2) reflects poorly on the character of the CEO who has been tasked with leading Yahoo at this critical juncture,” Loeb wrote in a letter to Yahoo’s board on Thursday. “Now more than ever Yahoo investors need a trustworthy CEO.”

In the past, other companies have suspended or fired executives who were caught lying on their resumes.

Yahoo hired Thompson to reverse years of financial lethargy that set in at the company even as more advertising shifted to the Internet. The funk has weighed on Yahoo’s stock, which has been hovering between $10 and $20 for most of the last three years. Yahoo shares fell 27 cents to close at $15.40 on Thursday. That’s well below the $33 per share that stockholders could have gotten in May 2008 if the board had accepted a takeover offer from Microsoft Corp.

The company stood behind Thompson in its statement payday loan. “This in no way alters that fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies,” Yahoo said. “Under Mr. Thompson’s leadership, Yahoo is moving forward to grow the company and drive shareholder value.”

Tensions between Loeb and Thompson escalated since late March when Yahoo appointed three new directors to its board. In doing so, Yahoo snubbed Loeb, who had been lobbying for a board seat along with three allies who he believes have the skills necessary to help Yahoo rebound from its long-running struggles. At the time, Thompson made it clear that he and the Yahoo committee overseeing the search for new directors had concluded Loeb wasn’t the best candidate.

Loeb is waging a campaign to persuade Yahoo’s shareholders to elect him and his allies to the board at the company’s annual meeting. The date of that meeting still hasn’t been set.

Besides ripping Thompson, Loeb also sought to discredit Patti Hart, one of the Yahoo directors he wants bounced from the board. Hart led the committee that recommended Yahoo’s new appointments to the board.

In his letter, Loeb noted that Yahoo’s recent SEC filing says Hart holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University. In its response, Yahoo clarified Hart received a bachelor’s degree in business administration with specialties in marketing and economics.

Thompson, 54, has mostly cut costs to boost profits since taking over as Yahoo’s CEO. Last month, he laid off about 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the biggest payroll purge in Yahoo’s 17-year history. He also disclosed plans to close about 50 Yahoo services that haven’t been attracting enough users or generating enough revenue.

He has made modest progress on other financial fronts. Yahoo registered its first year-over-year increase in quarterly net revenue since 2008 during the three months ending in March.

Even though he doesn’t have a computer science degree, Thompson has a background in technology. He served as PayPal’s chief technology officer for three years before being promoted to the payment service’s president in 2008. He also previously worked as chief technology officer at credit- and debit-card processor Visa USA.

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Germany’s top central banker is rejecting calls for the European Central Bank to cut interest rates and offer more support to banks and bond markets.

Jens Weidmann says that “monetary policy is not a panacea and central bank firepower is not unlimited,” particularly within the constraints of a currency shared by 17 countries.

Weidmann heads Germany’s Bundesbank and sits on the 23-member governing council of the ECB.

He was responding to calls by some international finance officials for the ECB to do more to support the eurozone economy and its indebted governments. Weidmann said the central bank system in Europe has already done a lot and can’t be a substitute for inaction by governments on budget-cutting and pro-growth reforms.

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The Bank of England

France’s foreign minister says an array of international sanctions targeting Syria’s repressive regime have depleted its financial reserves by half _ and Damascus is actively trying to evade them.

Alain Juppe called Tuesday for a solid international response to such “maneuvers” as he opened a Paris meeting of 57 countries to tighten sanctions against President Bashar Assad.

The actual size of Syria’s financial reserves isn’t known, but it was believed to be around $17 billion at the start of the uprising in March 2011. Juppe didn’t specify how much of Syria’s finances were impacted by sanctions, but said “our information” is that they have been cut in half.

Diplomats and finance ministry officials from the Arab world, the West and elsewhere were meeting in Paris to coordinate sanction measures against Assad’s repressive regime.

The Arab League and the European Union are among more than 50 participants who want to keep up pressure on Assad.

Juppe was set to kick off Tuesday’s closed-door talks in Paris under the “Friends of Syria” banner. But two Arab League nations _ Syrian neighbors Iraq and Lebanon _ were not attending.

Diplomats say a string of EU, U.S. and other sanctions are affecting Assad by curbing Syria’s ability to export oil.

Speaking at a separate meeting in Moscow, Syrian opposition members say they have sensed a shift in Russia’s stance on the conflict in their homeland and voiced hope Tuesday that Moscow will crank up pressure on Assad’s regime.

On a visit to Moscow, Haytham Manna, spokesman for the Arab Commission for Human Rights, said Russia has voiced support for democratic changes in Syria and believes the Syrians themselves should determine the country’s future.

“The representatives of the Russian government aren’t inclined to support the idea of preservation of the dictatorial regime,” Manna told a news conference. “They are talking about the need for continuing democratic changes, and it’s very important for us.”

Abdul-Aziz al-Kheir, a spokesman for the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria, said Russia’s position has been changing over the past two months and “particularly fast over the past two weeks payday loan.”

Members of the Syrian opposition said they hoped Russia will apply its power to persuade Assad to observe U.N. and Arab league envoy Kofi Annan’s cease-fire plan to end 13 months of violence in Syria.

“Russia has all the necessary levers to apply pressure on Assad’s government and help Annan’s mission,” Manna said.

Hassan Abdul-Azim, the head of the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change who is leading the delegation, said Moscow’s support is essential for the success of Annan’s mission.

“That is the last chance to end the fratricidal massacre and create preconditions for the transfer to a democratic form of government,” he said.

Manna said that while the opposition was encouraged by the talks in Moscow, differences remain. Russia continues to be strongly critical of Assad opponents using force, Manna said, while the opposition views it as a legitimate response to the violence on the part of the regime.

He said that the opposition delegation also sought to assuage Russia’s concerns about the rise of Islamism in Syria and prospects of continuing violence in the country in case of regime change.

The opposition delegation is expected to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later Tuesday.

Lavrov has recently criticized Assad for dragging his feet on reforms and using excessive force. He and other Russian officials have strongly urged their old ally to observe Annan’s plan.

Russia, along with China, has twice shielded Assad’s regime from U.N. sanctions over its deadly crackdown on a popular uprising. But Moscow has strongly supported Annan’s cease-fire plan to end 13 months of violence and begin talks on Syria’s political future.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner warned Congress against repeating last year

Foreclosures increased through most of the St. Louis metro area during the first three months of the year, RealtyTrac reported Thursday.

The increases varied widely by county.  In St. Louis County, where 1,874 homes were threatened with foreclosure or already in bank’s hands, the number rose by 3 percent during January-to-March period, compared to the last three months of 2011.  But St. Charles County saw a 30 percent increase, bringing the number of foreclosed and threatened homes to 663.

The severity of the foreclosure situation also varies by area.  St. Louis city is faring the worse, with one out of 218 homes in foreclosure.  By contrast, only one in every 957 homes in Monroe county were in foreclosure.

Foreclosure hit one in 234 homes in St. Louis County, one in 213 in St. Charles County, one in 228 in Jefferson, 539 in Lincoln, 253 in Madison and 274 in St. Clair.

Nationally, RealtyTrac reported that foreclosures declined 2 percent in the first quarter, and were 16 percent below the same period in 2011 on line pay day loans.  Foreclosures were at their lowest since late 2007.

Analysts generally expect foreclosure filings to increase in the wake of February’s settlement between the government and major mortgage servicers over abusive foreclosure practices.

“The low foreclosure numbers in the first quarter are not an indication that the massive reservoir of distressed properties built up over the past few years has somehow miraculously evaporated,” said Brandon Moore, chief executive at RealtyTrac, an online market for foreclosed homes.  “The dam may not burst in the next 30 to 45 days, but it will burst.”

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St. Louis area casinos turned in generally flat results in March, the slack time between winter and the start of the spring tourism season.

The area’s six gambling halls took in $103.2 million last month, up 3 percent from the $99.8 million take in March 2011. Last month’s results marked the second full year of operation of Pinnacle Entertainment’s River City casino, which shows steady double-digit monthly revenue gains.

Figures out Tuesday from regulators in Missouri and Illinois showed that three St. Louis-area casinos posted revenue gains in March while three experienced generally small declines.

Ameristar, in St. Charles, and Harrah’s, in Maryland Heights, frequently trade places as the area’s largest casinos by revenue. It was Harrah’s turn in March, when it edged Ameristar $25.2 million to $24.8 million in monthly revenue. Argosy Alton continued to struggle the most, with revenue down 9.3 percent over March 2011 figures.

April’s results could provide a clearer look at what has become a mature St. Louis casino market. In April 2011, revenue growth continued after the expansion-driven bump River City provided. The unusually mild weather this month and the start of baseball season, which is bringing more tourists — and gamblers — could show further evidence that St. Louis is a slowly growing but steady billion-dollar casino market.

Scuffling along

Casino            March change           Revenue (in mill.)

Harrah’s             8.1 percent                   $25.2

River City         12.7 percent                   $19.3

Lumière Place   -2.7 percent                  $15.4

Ameristar         -0.1 percent                  $24.8

Casino Queen   2.8 percent                  $12.1

Argosy Alton    -9.3 percent                    $6.4

Market total      3.3 percent                $103.2

Sources: Missouri Gaming Commission, Illinois Gaming Board

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