Earlier this morning I had an assignment that's amounted to an exercise in just how "meta" this crowdsourced world has become. 

Today, Facebook -- which provides a venue for the largest crowd ever amassed in human history to gather -- is throwing itself open to global capital on the Nasdaq stock exchange, AKA old-school crowdfunding. So if the Facebook IPO is really about allowing the crowd to invest in the potential of a huge crowd, it makes sense to also use the crowd to predict how much money it will take in from the crowd today.

Wow, that's confusing -- but totally meta.

Meet facebookipodayclosingprice.com, which I wrote about earlier today on CNET. It's a simple site that was thrown together over night by a British programmer and entrepreneur on the suggestion of a big-time venture investor.

The site aggregates all of the predictions of Facebook's first day closing price seen on Twitter before the stock actually started trading around 11:30 am Eastern this morning. Based on over 2,000 tweeted predictions, the official guess is that $54 will be the end of day price.

So far, though, it's looking like the crowd -- which may lean towards social networking enthusiasts and optimists given that it's culled from Twitter -- might be a little off, as Facebook has struggled so far to stay near $42 a share.

Insiders and pundits close to the topic are helpful, but sometimes you just need a bigger and broader crowd to get better information. 

Also: Join the discussion on Facebook's IPO and whether or not the social network could be considering the world's biggest crowdsourcing platform.