Huge news out of Kirkland Palo Alto this afternoon: Obviously-couldn’t-handle-his-sophomore-tutorial Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, who founded a company which, you know, only 800,000,000 people around the world now use — maybe you’ve heard of it, or seen a movie about it, or something — has filed its formal application with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell its shares on the open market (with the out-of-left-field symbol FB).

With a goal of raising $5 billion, the IPO would be the largest for an Internet-focused company since that of Google in 2004 (the same year that Thefacebook went live to the classes of ’04 through ’08 here in Cambridge), and could mean that the whole company is worth about $100 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, who owns about 28% of the company, is therefore worth around $30 billion.

Dammit, we should all just drop out and found computer startups. It sure worked for Zuck and Gates!

The New York Times’ DealBook blog has a pretty in-depth article on the subject. In the meantime, Harvard, scrape your pennies together and maybe you’ll be able to buy your own little slice of social-networking history.