Gutenberg Lampoon » Mike Tobias

Two big social net­work sto­ries out today. Face­book is now val­ued at over 9 bil­lion dol­lars, and Twit­ter now has a French version.

Of course Facebook’s story is a tiny bit more impres­sive. After all, unlike Twit­ter, Face­book can pay its employ­ees from rev­enue rather than fund­ing. That’s some­thing Twit­ter has been strug­gling with for a while. They’ve had some great ideas… like adding a Retweet but­ton (some­thing Twit­ter apps could already do), and adding Twit­ter Lists (some­thing Twit­ter apps could already do..), and Trend­ing Top­ics (which is con­tin­u­ally pop­u­lated with #hash­tags brain­stormed by sce­nea­gers.) But they’ve yet to fig­ure out how to make money off their broad base of users, which now includes the peo­ple of France.