“Are you on Facebook?”

How often do we hear this question, the modern-day equivalent of “Is your number listed?” (Number as in phone, listed as in the phone book, for those of you under the age of 30).

The query has a different connotation for small investors these days. As Facebook’s stock has gone from $38 to $45 to under $20, the most cautious among us ponder the right price at which to buy.

Too many of us remember the dot.com bubble. I bought some good ones (Lucent) and some duds (Sun Micro) and missed out on at least one juggernaut (bought Sun Micro instead of Apple, priced in the $30s, 11 years ago thinking Apple’s new I-products would be a flop; shares opened at $656 this morning).

The experience marked me. It drove me out of stock investing and into mutual funds exclusively.

But Facebook might be enough to coax me back. I’m not buying the company losing market share and becoming the next MySpace. Google is great, but Google+ is not going to carve up social media the way Google did the search engine.

The biggest threat to Facebook may be its size and reach. The youngest generations may decide its too un-cool (do they even use that term?) and latch onto something else. But even then it will take years for Facebook’s market share to erode – by which time the company will (hopefully) have innovated and evolved (kind of like Apple with the I-products).

For now, though, Facebook’s value as an investment is hard to pin down. And with more and more shares to be released onto the market between now and mid-November, a price below $15 – or even closer to $10 – is not inconceivable.

The question is, At what prices does the stock become irresistible?

Are you on Facebook? This investor is not ... yet. 

Follow the blogger on Twitter @avanbrimmer and on Facebook at /smndaddywarbucks.