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Facebook is changing the structure of its company stock to a dual-class system, a move that hints the company may be looking toward an initial public offering--even though it says it has no plans to do so yet.

Here's how it works. Existing Facebook shareholders currently have Class A stock. That'll be converted to Class B stock, which has 10 times the voting power of Class A. Should those shareholders sell their stock when Facebook goes public, they'll be converted back into Class A stock--otherwise, they'll stay the way they are.

The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which added the detail that this stock structure change will give founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg more power unless he opts to sell stock during an IPO. But while Zuckerberg and other executives have said that they eventually plan to take Facebook public, they continue to say that there are no concrete plans for it. Two years ago, Zuckerberg said that it was "years out."

"This revision to the stock structure should not be construed as a signal the company is planning to go public," a statement from Facebook read. "Facebook has no plans to go public at this time."

If social gaming is Hollywood, the people aren't as pretty. Well, maybe the avatars are.

Yes, yes, we know that social games are taking over the bloody world: earlier this week, gamemaker Playfish announced its $300 million sale to Electronic Arts, and on Thursday, rival Playdom retorted with the announcement of $43 million in venture funding at a $260 million valuation, and the acquisitions of smaller gaming companies Green Patch (manufacturer of Facebook-based games like Lil Green Patch and Farm Life) and Trippert Labs. Green Patch's games will up Playdom's reach on Facebook by 30 percent, the company said.

Expect to see more of these sales, as smaller developers find they're having trouble treading water in an industry where the big guys--Zynga, Playfish, Playdom--have chomped up most of the market share, and where Facebook, the biggest destination for these games, has shown that it can change the rules at whim. And the big companies, too, want to scramble to get bigger.

Plus, as Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson explained to CNET News: When gaming companies grow large, they have to deal with a lot of stuff that can get in the way of producing new games and staying on top of consumer trends. That's one reason to keep investing in new talent through acqusitions.

"The hitmakers start spending all their time on operations, and on things that don't improve or enhance the games, and so they become essentially owners and operators," he said. And likewise, "people who can create things shouldn't necessarily be operating a gaming company."

He drew the evolution of a social gaming company parallel to an entertainment studio: "a lot more like Hollywood or the traditional gaming industry" than a Web start-up.

But here's the catch when it comes to acquisitions in this space: Gaming, especially social gaming, is a hit-driven business. If a parent company buys up a hot Facebook game, that game could already be running out of shelf life: which is, indeed, sort of like a Hollywood establishment signing a contract with an actor who's had five hit films in a row, as he could easily be over the hill before long. (Hello, Rob Lowe.)

"I think we're getting pretty good at really looking at their data now, and modeling how these games will evolve over time," Thompson said. "But I think there's essentially a life cycle of growth and then decay. What we really look at in acquisitions is not just daily active users, but bringing on additional team members that can really help create new games in the future."

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.

LOS ANGELES--Twitter didn't rake in $100 million because it was about to run out of money, investor and board member Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital said in a panel at the 140 Conference on Tuesday morning.

There was still money left over, Sabet explained, from what the company had raised from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners in February, which followed Twitter's Series C round in the spring of 2008. Twitter, according to Sabet, raised the money from Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price last month because it wanted to grow up: hire new people, launch new products, strike partnerships, and the like. Contrary to Twitter's reputation for "fail whale" errors, Sabet insisted that the money wasn't needed for an emergency server shopping spree or anything. (Some may disagree.)

"The expectation when you raise a lot of money, it's a statement that you want to build a company, an independent company," Sabet said when moderator Robert Scoble asked him what he thought of the fact that Twitter has not yet put forth a long-term business model. "We didn't need the money...it was a very purposeful kind of commitment to try to make a company."

A billion-dollar valuation is pretty nice to have, too.

A correction was made at 2:13 p.m. PT: a source with knowledge of the deal confirmed that Twitter's April 2008 and February 2009 rounds of funding are considered to be separate rounds.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Among the tech industry's up-and-coming, ad-supported business models appear to be out of fashion. Or at least that appears to be the trend among the companies that just graduated from the annual Boulder, Colo.-based incubator program TechStars. Representatives from some of those start-ups convened for an "Investor Day" at a Microsoft-owned auditorium here on Wednesday morning.

Founded by venture capitalists David Cohen and Brad Feld three years ago, TechStars accepts a total of 20 participants in both Boulder and Boston for a summer of development, seminars with industry veterans, and a small amount of seed funding. Thirteen of those 20 companies were advanced enough to earn spots at Wednesday's Investor Day, in which they offered short presentations to more than 100 members of the venture capital community who are actively interested in making early-stage investments.

And not a single one was offering a strictly advertising-supported business model, something that would've been pretty unthinkable not so long ago.

"(These companies) are the future of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as it evolves," Feld said to the audience midway through the morning. "We think these are all very fundable companies. In fact, most of the companies that you're seeing today are either well down the path of closing financing, or have closed financing, but for many of them there's still room."

Unlike the TechCrunch50 start-up pitch event earlier this month, none of these companies were actually launching out of a total stealth mode. Some had already experienced a sort of PR blitz--travelogue site Everlater generated some buzz when people were using it to map their plans for airline JetBlue's "All You Can Jet" promotion, and unofficial Twitter app store OneForty experienced the usual tech-blog mayhem earlier this week when it launched in private alpha and set off a flurry among the early-adopter crowd as people scrambled for invites.

But like TechCrunch50's array of start-ups, most of the TechStars lineup had productivity on the brain. Gaming and entertainment companies were limited to TakeComics, which aims to bring an iTunes-inspired business model to the digitization of comic books, and AccelGolf, a decidedly hardcore set of mobile and Web-based applications for avid golfers.

Business-focused applications were far more commonplace. Retel Technologies has built security-camera software enhanced with data and analytics, NextBigSound tabulates bands and musicians' popularity on social-media and music sites to roll up into a product sold to industry professionals; SendGrid offers e-mail marketing services to businesses at a variety of price points; and HaveMyShift, built by a former Starbucks barista, offers an exchange for hourly employees at major chain stores to swap and pick up shifts.

The companies were a mixed bag, and so were the entrepreneurs behind them: many fell into the young-entrepreneur stereotype of puppy-faced young men who could use a haircut along with that seed funding, but others strayed from the norm. OneForty's Laura Fitton is already a respected Twitter consultant; Raj Aggarwal, CEO of mobile data start-up Localytics, is an Apple veteran who had helped construct the original business model for the iPhone; and the founders of mobile contact management company Sensobi professed to earlier entrepreneurial experience in the chocolate industry.

Of the entire lineup, Everlater--founded by two childhood friends who had quit their Wall Street jobs to found the company--offered the closest thing to the typical ad-supported consumer model that was so ubiquitous in Web 2.0's heyday a few years ago, and even still, the founders plan to sell customized scrapbook and postcard products as well as offer branded packages to travel companies hoping to get their name out there.

A few other TechStars presenters said they hoped to use a free, ad-supported model as an entry point for the subscription services where they plan to make more significant money: video-based language learning system LangoLab, for example, hopes to strike deals with online video hubs like Hulu and then charge for access to lessons based around that "premium" content, and open-source forum software Vanilla charges for the hosted version of its product.

Granted, these business models still have their pratfalls: namely, the fact that they actually have to find individuals or companies who are willing to pay, something that often requires the formation of a solid marketing or sales department before profits can start to roll in. That was why many of them said they were looking to close early-stage funding rounds soon.

But those solicitations for funding were not lofty. Almost all of the TechStars presentations provided a target amount that they were seeking for their angel or Series A rounds (a few had closed rounds already), and the vast majority were south of $1 million--far south, in some cases.

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.

Twitter's long-anticipated business plan had better be close on the horizon, because according to the Wall Street Journal, the site has some new investors on board: Mutual fund T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, and a handful of others have reportedly pumped $100 million into the microblogging phenomenon.

TechCrunch reported last week that Twitter was putting together a round of funding at around a $1 billion valuation. But that report suggested that the company would do so by raising about $50 million--half of what it actually has, per the WSJ, in a deal expected to close Thursday.

Twitter still doesn't make significant revenue. But its founders have said that paid corporate accounts, in the form of a sort of "analytics dashboard," are imminent. Advertising isn't out of the question either, despite what some of the company's executives have said in the past.

The company's initial round of Series B funding last year valued it at about $80 million, but soon added to the round in a deal that upped the valuation well into the hundreds of millions.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to increase the company's head count by as much as 50 percent this year. The young founder said in an interview with Bloomberg that since there are a significant number of engineers and developers looking for work, Facebook--still flush with venture funding, and with revenues on the rise--can scoop them up.

As you may recall, Facebook had aimed to hit 1,000 employees by the end of 2008, but the market crash stalled that aim. The company currently has 1,000 employees, the Bloomberg article said.

But Zuckerberg also said he's trying to keep down costs so that the company can finally achieve profitability. Facebook has been keeping a lid on employee perks for some time now, even though it does feed its minions for free, Google-style.

"The thing I want to remind people of is we're way closer to the beginning than the end," Zuckerberg said in the Bloomberg interview, published Monday, explaining why Facebook moved to a stripped-down, concrete-walled office building when it needed a bigger headquarters. "A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you've made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage."

Not everything he said was tinged with humility: he did confirm that he eventually hopes Facebook will have a billion users. Right now, it's over a quarter of the way there.

Well, it looks like Twitter will actually do it.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year. He said that yes, it will involve offering paid accounts to businesses that use the microblogging platform for marketing, customer relations, publicity, and what-have-you. That's something Twitter has been hinting at for about a year now.

There's not a whole lot of detail available. But paid accounts will definitely involve statistics and analytics that aren't available through Twitter's existing application program interface (API), and possibly a whole separate "commercial API" for business-related applications. This adds to a move earlier this year in which Twitter started rolling out an account verification process for prominent users.

In fact, Stone told Marshall, the first test phase of these accounts is already under way with a few companies. Considering Twitter's status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55 million in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that's good news.

Marshall points out something important: "It might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for." Stone made it pretty clear in the interview that ordinary Twitter users won't be forced to pay up.

Another interesting tidbit: Stone said that Twitter had been looking to acquire social-network aggregator FriendFeed, which was picked up by Facebook earlier this month.