According to The Register, Nokia is in talks to acquire a stake in Facebook with a view to “porting the social network on to Nokia handsets in a major way”. The key point of surprise is that while Nokia has close to a Billion paying customers and Facebook has only 50 million (who hardly pay a bean) Nokia is likely to pay Facebook for the privilege!

So why is Facebook worth so much?

The answer, of course, is that it’s not - the large valuations on Facebook are complete nonsense.

Microsoft paid $240M for a 1.6% share of Facebook to keep Google out and nothing more!

But that’s quite a business model for Facebook - keep finding major players in other markets willing to sign up “exclusive” deals. 240 mil here, another 150 mil there would be enough to keep the Z boy in business cards for life.

So Nokia is either being very clever or very stupid, it’s a shame it’s not clear which.

But I wonder if Zuckerberg understands the irony of running a social website funded my companies who just want to exclude each other.