Twitter

A fund overseen by global investment manager BlackRock has offered to buy $80 million in stock from early Twitter employees, according to reports, in a deal that values Twitter at more than $9 billion.

The valuation figure is a jump of more than 10 percent from the social network's most recent fund-raising, in 2011, the Financial Times said in its report (subscription required), which cites unnamed sources. The offer highlights Twitter's growth as talk resurfaces about a possible IPO.

Earlier today, New York analyst firm Greencrest Capital predicted a 2014 IPO for Twitter and valued the company at … Read more

mixing gnarly basslines today vine.co/v/b55LOA1dgJU

I'll admit it, I misjudged Vine. Here's why.

One of the first things I read about Vine, Twitter's new stand-alone video app for iPhone and iPod Touch, was Jack Dorsey's gushing tweet about the service.

"Vine is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while," Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder (and also founder of Square), tweeted yesterday morning. "Not just because of the team, because it brings an entirely new art form to the world."

I … Read more

After taking heat for shutting off some apps' access to friend-finding data, Facebook says it's just protecting its assets.

The social network published a blog entry today, explaining that it's changed its policies to clarify this stance. Facebook didn't respond to press inquiries yesterday about why it had shut off access to its application programming interface, or API, for a number of apps. Access to the API allows developers to add features like Facebook logins and Facebook friend searches.

Facebook's director of platform partnerships and operations, Justin Osofsky, wrote in the blog that the company has … Read more

Vine is not yet a day old and Facebook is already shutting its virtual doors to Twitter's newly acquired video-sharing service.

Vine users are suddenly blocked from using the app's friend-finding feature to look up Facebook friends. Instead of letting you search for your Facebook buddies, the Vine app responds with the message, "Vine is not authorized to make this Facebook request."

It looks like Facebook has blocked Vine from accessing its API, or application programming interface, which would let Vine extract that data.

The move sounds like what Twitter did to a few other companies … Read more

Six seconds isn't a lot of time to work with, but that's the length of video Twitter's new Vine service dishes out. The looping videos can be embedded in tweets and have already been described as "Instagram for video." Vine's out as of today as an app for iOS, with other platforms in the works.

The short time limit isn't stemming the flow of creativity from Vine's early users. So far, we've seen everything from a monster flick to a moving sale to a recipe demonstration. Here's a roundup of some noteworthy early Vine videos.… Read more

Twitter must hand over the identities of users in France who post racist tweets, a French court ruled today.

According to AFP, the court's ruling stemmed from a test case "that pitted the right to free speech against laws banning hate speech," and answered a petition made in October by the French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), which had claimed that many anti-Semitic tweets had violated the law in the European country.

The UEJF had demanded that Twitter do a better job of policing obviously anti-Semitic tweets.

Twitter said today in a statement that "we are … Read more

Twitter today unveiled Vine, an app for iPhone and iPod Touch that lets anyone create and share short looping videos.

Twitter acquired Vine last fall, but anyone can use Vine regardless of whether they use Twitter. However, the service is clearly meant to be embedded anywhere, and there are plenty of examples of the videos being embedded in tweets. The service (see an example below) is being referred to by many as Twitter's "Instagram for video."

Holding hands at Tilden park vine.co/v/biTaEEwdq2n?1

Vine videos are limited to … Read more

Twitter is gearing up for an IPO in 2014, argued a New York analyst firm in a new report that cites the microblogging giant's recent management moves, its strategic partnerships, its growing mobile revenue, and other factors as evidence for the move.

In the report, titled "Twitter, Inc. on flight path to 2014 IPO (Summary, PDF)," Greencrest Capital laid out its theories for why the company might soon go public.

"Is Twitter positioning for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2014? The micro-blogging site has made a number of announcements since our last report, including management … Read more

Twitter's CEO may have teased the company's own hosted video service in a tweet this morning.

As Twitter has aimed to take more control over the services its users rely on, it has consolidated access to photo-sharing, restricted third-party clients, and clamped down on developers. It has also made acquisitions aimed at bolstering its own offerings. Among them have been those that have led to Twitter's official search tool, its purchase of TweetDeck, and others.

One recent acquisition, according to AllthingsD, was Vine, a video clip service that never launched.

Today, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo posted a tweet (… Read more