Facebook Kicking Off IPO With All-Night Hackathon

Facebook is holding an all-nighter tonight, in advance of tomorrow’s IPO and its first day as a public company. The company will hold a "hackathon," a long-standing tradition involving employees working quickly on whatever they want, which has produced products including Facebook chat. It will culminate tomorrow morning with Mark Zuckerberg ringing the NASDAQ bell, TechCrunch reports.

An internal event page shows about 1,000 employees attending, and a source tells All Things Digital that Zuckerberg will likely be in attendance at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters. "We want to get everyone together and remind ourselves that this company is about building things," says a source. Facebook likes the word "hacker," and Zuckerberg has argued that despite its negative connotation, it actually "just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done." (More Facebook stories.)