It seems that Facebook’s traffic had a downturn last month and within the blogosphere the panic button hasn’t so much been hit as slammed. With reports just weeks ago of Microsoft’s potential minority stake in Facebook putting its valuation at $10 billion (and Facebook supposedly asking for $15 billion), people are now starting to really wonder, is Facebook worth that kind of money?

The simple answer is certainly not right now, but eventually, probably. The problem is that $10-15 billion is an extreme amount for “probably”. But this is a tradition as old as time itself; you have to take risks to reap the rewards. Sure Facebook isn’t worth $10 billion right now, but you are bidding on potential. Look at News Corp which bought rival MySpace just over 2 years ago for $580 million – yes million. If the same transaction were to happen today (again, just two years later) everyone would agree that the transaction would be in the billions and quite likely in the double-digit billions.

Jason Calacanis has a nice reality check breakdown. Some, it seems, want to put Facebook’s valuation as high as $100 billion. That is laughably ridiculous. As Calacanis points out, that would mean Google would have to be worth about $14 trillion dollars! Some people are also putting Facebook platform apps values as high as $500 million – again utterly absurd. You read this paragraph and your immediate thought is of 1999 once again, and it should be. If anyone is stupid enough to buy into this BS, they should lose all their money on silly risks because it’s simply a waste for them to have it in their possession.

If Facebook did have a drop in traffic, it’s a story, but it’s not the end of the world. As many have pointed out, this has happened before with Facebook and they obviously came back in a big way. Kara Swisher wonders if this hiccup will help Yahoo make a move to buy a stake in Facebook as she has heard they are “seriously considering”. If I were them, I would do it – the price may be inflated, but the upside is too big to pass up. Risks are needed to catch Google.