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Rumors earlier this week of Twitter negotiating a new round of funding at a valuation of $1 billion are confirmed today by co-founder Evan Williams on the Twitter Blog. TechCrunch reports this latest round of funding has closed with Twitter receiving $100 million.

Twitter’s previous round of funding raised $35 million in February of 2009 at a valuation of $250 million. The new figure of $1 billion quadruples Twitter’s valuation in just 7 months.

Keeping in the spirit that you have to spend money to make money, Twitter has yet to produce a viable revenue stream. We anticipate that this $100 million injection is contingent on Twitter rolling out a paid advertising platform in the very near future. It’s worth noting that Facebook received $716 million in funding before finally announcing, less than two weeks ago, the company is now cash flow positive.

Evan William thanks Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley as contributing investment firms. Twitter to date has received $155 million in venture funding.

Sources: Twitter Blog, TechCrunch

An effort to restructure MySpace into a more innovative and entrepreneurial business results in News Corp cutting 30% of the social network’s staff this week, approximately 400 employees. MySpace has seen nothing but bad news lately, traffic has been dwindling and last month the platform was dethroned as the number one social media network in the U.S. by rival Facebook.
 
“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” said MySpace Chief Executive Officer Owen Van Natta. These layoffs have been attributed to Google’s decision to heavily downsize it’s $300 million per year advertising deal with MySpace. Sources suggest Google is looking for something closer to $50 million per year.
 
While many MySpace employees appear to be expendable as of late, including former CEO Chris DeWolfe, co-founder Tom Anderson remains on the roster, and still friends with everyone.

Almost a year after stating the intention, Digg follows through with implementing Facebook Connect, which allows Facebook users to skip the registration process and log into partner websites (such as Digg) with their Facebook ID, relying on their trust in Facebook’s authentication. One benefit for partner sites is in allowing users to quickly interact with their site and share branded content back to Facebook friends. Partner sites can also reference information from a user’s Facebook profile to tailor content specifically for that user based on criteria such as location, interests, etc.

Facebook, in response to other popular social sites such as FriendFeed and Twitter, has redesigned their traditionally click-to-update news feed into a live status stream. New advanced filters have also been added to the mix that allow you to view your status stream for just family members, local friends or a variety of other options. Preview the new Facebook design set to go live mid next week.

Last week an article discussing Twitter’s lack of loyalty stated that this was not an issue for Facebook or MySpace. Well at least for the latter there seems to be a difference of opinion, or actually fact. Today an article in the New York Times discussing a MySpace makeover and the challenges facing their new CEO Owen Van Natta who is just starting his second week, also points out comScore statistics that show MySpace in actually losing users, most likely to Facebook. Several of my friends have used MySpace bulletins to let their friends know that they are moving to Facebook. Some even go as far as to change their profile names to phrases such as “Jenny (Who now only uses Facebook).”

Well in Twitter’s case, my opinion is that these flaky tweeters are simply the effect of Twitter’s recent popularity spike. Microblogging is not for everyone. I’m sure Twitter will settle into steady growth pattern in the near future. Perhaps if Twitter does add new features to their platform they may appeal to a wider and more dedicated user base. As for MySpace, they may need to focus their efforts on their younger users to bring some momentum back to their social networking super-engine! Both of these platforms still have alot of potential that I think has yet to be realized.