The Social

Yes, Twitter's megacash infusion is real. CEO Evan Williams confirmed on the company blog Friday that Twitter has raised a new round of investment from Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital.

Williams says it's "a significant round." He didn't say just how close it was to the roughly $100 million that The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Nor did he say whether this values Twitter at $1 billion.

"It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value," Williams wrote in the blog post. "Twitter's journey has just begun, and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I'm proud of the team we've built so far, and I'm confident in the future we'll build together."

Before the end of the year, Twitter is expected to start rolling out paid corporate accounts to businesses that use the service for marketing, promotion, and customer service.

Seriously, how much is Facebook worth? It's been an enigma in tech gossip for years now, as the social-networking company grows bigger and bigger and yet remains privately held. And some of Facebook's most rapid growth has taken place in the midst of a stormy economic climate that could batter any company's balance sheet. So here's a rundown of what tech blogs, news outlets, investors, and Valley gadflies have said thus far about just how much Facebook is worth.

Are all these numbers accurate? In a word, no. Some of them were rumors (albeit decently strong ones, as we've omitted some of the more ridiculous ones), and others refer to Facebook's preferred-stock valuation, which as we learned during its legal tiff with onetime rival ConnectU, that isn't necessarily anywhere close to the company's paper valuation.

One thing that's interesting: Take a look at the trajectory. Facebook's perceived valuation keeps climbing and climbing and climbing right up to its $240 million investment by Microsoft. Then, once the hype dies down (and the market starts to sputter) it tanks. It's not until, perhaps not coincidentally, the departure of chief financial officer Gideon Yu and the stronger likelihood of a new investment round that Facebook's valuation starts to climb again.

What's next? Digital Sky Technologies' investment in Facebook assumed a preferred-stock valuation of $10 billion, and employee stock trades have started at about a $6.5 billion valuation. It's not yet clear how much more the company's worth will fluctuate before, at long last, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team decide to take it public. That is, of course, assuming that actually happens.

It's been a big week for Mark Zuckerberg.

First of all, the young Facebook founder and CEO finally turned 25. That was last Thursday. But more importantly for the tech rumor mill, he's had to deal with a fresh flurry of speculation: did the company really turn down a $200 million funding round at an $8 billion valuation? Has it raised $150 million specifically so that employees can cash out their stock?

Needless to say, in Zuckerberg's interview Tuesday at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, he didn't answer any of those questions concretely. His response to the notion of more capital was, in short, that Facebook doesn't need it but that doesn't mean they won't raise it.

"If there's an investment to be done on very good terms, we will consider it if for no other reason than to have more buffer if we want to do something in the future," Reuters quoted Zuckerberg as saying. "Some of the rumblings that people are reporting on, are just different conversations that have happened, but there's really nothing new to talk about there."

He did say that it'll be "a few years" before the company chooses to go public.

There have been rumors that Facebook will launch an ad network for the developers using Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Zuckerberg offered the company's version of a neither-confirm-nor-deny answer when asked about this, saying (per Reuters) that "it could be a pretty natural extension for us to do something with ads or a number of other things that we've considered." Somebody's been well trained in the vague language department.

Only 25 years old, and he's already mastered that complicated Jedi trick known as the non-answer. Impressive!

Everybody's playing the Facebook valuation game again, in light of persistent reports that the social network is in need of more cash to fuel its rapid and expensive global expansion.

The rumors aren't too surprising. Given the recession and the tough advertising climate, the numbers getting tossed around are some of the lowest we've seen recently.

Currently circulating: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected a fresh round of funding that would have valued the company at $4 billion. Another: one potential investor submitted a term sheet for a valuation in the neighborhood of $2 billion.

What we've heard: Facebook stock trades privately at between a $2 billion and $3 billion valuation. That's consistent with the numbers that everybody else is tossing around. And we've known for a while that when the ConnectU vs. Facebook legal spat was settled, Facebook valued itself around $3.7 billion.

What's new this time around is that reports indicate Zuckerberg is extremely adamant about rejecting investment cash at a valuation he considers too low. When Facebook took a $240 million stake from Microsoft in November 2007, the investment was at a $15 billion valuation. Since then, it's become clear that it was a preferred-stock deal and that Facebook's true valuation has never been that high. But from what it sounds like, Zuckerberg would like it to get up there.

It was long before the massive Microsoft stake, after all, that Yahoo offered to buy the social network for $1 billion. Considering how much Facebook has grown since then--not to mention the new investments--the valuation shouldn't be only two or three times that.

"As a matter of policy, we don't comment on financial matters such as company valuation," a Facebook representative told CNET News in an e-mail.

This post was updated at 8:41 a.m. PT.

The murkiness surrounding Facebook's valuation got in the way of its attempt to acquire Twitter last year, according to a BusinessWeek article posted Sunday.

Early Facebook investor Peter Thiel's interview with BusinessWeek make it sound like while the talks were serious, they simply didn't go that far: "It became pretty clear it wasn't going to happen...The deal would have to be done with Facebook stock. And then you have to figure out how much the stock is worth." Twitter, according to an anonymous source, was told that the social network's valuation was in the range of $8 billion or $9 billion but was aware that employees were privately trading stock at a valuation that was, at most, half that.

So the deal didn't happen.

Controversy over the true value of the privately owned company also came into play earlier last year when the settlement of the ConnectU vs. Facebook lawsuit was being negotiated. Court documents were redacted to keep the true valuation under wraps, and media outlets, including CNET News, petitioned to have the documents made public. The founders of small social-network ConnectU, who had sued Facebook because they claimed founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their code and business plan, contested the original settlement when they said they had been misled as to Facebook's true valuation.

Way back in October 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation. The company's actual valuation was never really that high, and with the recession, it's currently somewhere south of $4 billion.

But valuations aside, would Twitter really have been a smart buy for Facebook? The "status update" feature on Facebook is very Twitter-like, but integrating the two services would've involved all kinds of complications. For one, Facebook's content is still hidden behind a log-in wall, whereas Twitter's "tweets" proliferate all over the Web. And while Facebook's profitability woes have been well-documented, Twitter beats it in that department: the buzzworthy start-up hasn't yet made public a business model of any kind.

In his interview with BusinessWeek, Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, didn't discount the possibility that Facebook could make other acquisitions in the future. But as the interview also points out, that could be difficult as long as Facebook's valuation remains as volatile as it has been in recent months.

Here's a message for all the tech bloggers and reporters freaking out over the alleged Associated Press bombshell that some copy-paste legerdemain led to the revelation that Facebook valued itself at $3.7 billion at the time of the ConnectU vs. Facebook court settlement:

Please, chill out! This is not news!

While it had not yet been reported that the ConnectU settlement was a reported $65 million (though since it was in cash and stock, that value may have dropped with the onset of the recession), the $3.7 billion Facebook valuation has been around since July.

The New York Times' Brad Stone broke the figure--well, $3.75 billion--amid the hullabaloo surrounding the redacted court transcripts. I know we're bloggers and we have the attention spans of goldfish and all, but the hype over this "shocker" is a bit silly.

Earlier this week, the AP had obtained court documents dating back to June, when ConnectU vs. Facebook was settled. The founders of ConnectU, former Harvard classmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, had sued the eventual CEO because they alleged he stole their intellectual property when he was employed as a programmer for ConnectU. But the court documents were kept sealed, largely because there was information pertaining to the privately owned Facebook's valuation. Media outlets, among them CNET News, had lobbied to have the redacted documents made public. The AP eventually used a copy-paste function in an electronic version in order to expose the censored content. Oops.

ConnectU, meanwhile, has contested the settlement because its founders, who include identical twins and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, claimed they were misled as to how much Facebook was worth.

Facebook's valuation has been the subject of scrutiny ever since Microsoft invested $240 million in the social network at a sky-high $15 billion valuation. But that investment was one of preferred stock, and it soon became clear that Facebook's paper valuation was significantly lower.

The AP story does have one new tidbit: Facebook was appraised at $8.88 per potential share as part of the $3.7 billion valuation. That figure obviously has dropped since then, given the impact of the recession.

Aside from that, this is a story that was reported almost eight months ago. Keep calm and carry on, folks. To my fellow members of the media, I'm sure there's a "cool new use for Twitter" story to be reported. We clearly can't get enough of those.

Another day, another clump of Facebook financial dirt.

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital wrote early Tuesday that "according to sources," Facebook is considering the possibility of a massive new investment round. If this turns out to be true, it could lift the company's much-talked-about valuation even further into the stratosphere. Facebook's last investment round, a $25 million bounty in 2006, pushed its pre-money valuation to about $525 million. This rumored new round, which Swisher claims is "well beyond" that scope, could solidify Facebook's position in the $6 billion to $10 billion club (where, thus far, only speculation has placed it).

Swisher also speculates that Microsoft could be one of the potential players in this murky new investment round; Microsoft, after all, is responsible for the advertising contract that makes up a considerable chunk of Facebook's revenue, and it's also one of the names that pops up the most as buyout rumors surface and resurface.

"While its revenues are growing strongly, insiders report, so are its costs," Swisher's post explains, "as it ratchets up headcount and features and services. Thus, it will need a lot of investment to kept competitive, including increasing its international profile."