Af­ter a mar­ket de­but marred by tech­ni­cal glitch­es and a deep dive in the com­pa­ny's stock price, Face­book has spent the past year fo­cused on its biggest weak­ness­es: how to make mon­ey and keep its more than 1 bil­lion users teth­ered to the so­cial net­work.

The re­sults have been mixed. The com­pa­ny's stock price has re­cov­ered some of its worst loss­es, and Face­book has an­nounced sev­er­al mon­ey­mak­ing ini­tia­tives. But the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the IPO are still un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion, and some in­vestors re­main un­con­vinced the so­cial net­work has stay­ing pow­er.

Face­book's mar­ket de­but last May was sup­posed to be the com­ing-of-age mo­ment for a new gen­er­a­tion of tech com­pa­nies and a sure­fire bet for the small in­vestor.In­stead, doubts about whether the young com­pa­ny was ma­ture enough to meet share­hold­ers' de­mands helped send the com­pa­ny's shares down from its open­ing price of $38 per share to a low of $17.55 in Au­gust.

Wash­ing­ton Post