Twitter: Bringing You Ever Closer to the Fame Flame

If you're on Twitter, you already know that it's a drug. It's like a big get-together where you can talk to hundreds of people without committing yourself too seriously and before you know it ... poof ... you've just spent three hours talking about your summer reading. I've made a concerted effort to not let it overtake my life and I've generally succeeded.

But one aspect of Twitter that I find so pathetically alluring is the celebrity follow. Now, my time on Cinematical has already introduced me to a lot of Big Names, and while it's always fun and exciting to meet someone you like onscreen, it's often just work. Often, it's awkward work. I say that not to brag or play down the experience, but to stress that chasing celebrities just isn't my thing. Except on Twitter.

Twitter is like this shadowy, secret party where Hollywood's creme de la creme are eating, drinking, laughing, and filming, and they're coyly letting you watch. They casually drop names and TwitPics, and there's something about that that's so alluring once paired with a timestamp.
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Facebook: Twitter is “in the rear-view mirror”

Twitter may still be the media darling of the day, getting all kinds of attention amid its huge user growth earlier this year. But Facebook, once considered Twitter’s most fierce competitor because it also wants to let users post bite-sized updates online about their thoughts, apparently no longer thinks of Twitter as a threat.

Facebook’s executives aren’t really thinking much about Twitter these days and see it as a niche site which is unlikely to grow — or at least, so they say.

“Twitter is a great company,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s vice president of growth, mobile and international expansion in an interview yesterday. “What they do is offer a way to publish information in a very consumable, public way.”

But, he continued, “they’re in the rear-view mirror.”

“To focus on a company with 40 million users that is not growing is not a good idea,” he said, citing Hitwise market share data as evidence of Twitter’s slowdown.

Palihapitiya said the last time he thought about the company was when Twitter board member Bijan Sabet looked him up in April and took him to coffee. (It’s amusing that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone used the exact same “rear-view mirror” language to describe the competition when we talked to him last month.)

Palihapitiya made the comments in a portion of the interview where we asked him about which company — Google or Twitter — is the bigger competitor to Facebook. Other Facebook executives, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, have also suggested that Google is more of a competitor than Twitter.

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Twitter Goes for Broke, if Broke Means

Is Twitter a billion-dollar company? It is now, according to its investors. People familiar with the company tell me it has raised around $50 million in a funding round that values the start-up, which has no real revenue to speak of, at about $1 billion.

TechCrunch, which first reported the funding, says CEO Evan Williams informed his employees about the new deal at a recent companywide meeting. I’m told the round is all but finished: “If the money isn’t in the bank yet, it will be soon,” a source tells me.

No word on who has invested in the company in this go-round, but it’s almost certain Twitter was able to entice new backers to join its existing investors: Silicon Valley logic dictates that each successive funding round should attract new money.

In February, Twitter raised approximately $35 million in a round led by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners that valued it at $250 million.

Twitter Goes for Broke, if Broke Means “A Lot of Money”: New Funding Round at $1 Billion Valuation

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