Facebook "doesn't see a dime from Slide and RockYou," two of the largest application developers on the social networking site, but that may soon change, says Mike Shields of Mediaweek. As the company struggles to find a sustainable revenue model, some industry watchers think Facebook will soon impose a tax or revenue sharing requirement on application developers. "A deal of that sort is probably in the works," says digital media analyst Anton Denissov of Parks Associates. After all, app makers offer an increasingly viable alternative for advertisers to reach users on social networking sites, so a move to get in …

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is set to announce a dramatic management reorganization this week, Kara Swisher reports. According to several unnamed sources, U.S. Audience SVP Jeff Dossett has also been working on an overall change in how Yahoo makes and delivers content that could be announced this week, as well. Under the plan, Yahoo's media unit would be split into three parts: vertical programming, network programming and search monetization. It's unclear whether Yahoo will keep its traditional structure of having power GMs lead each of these units, Swisher said. However, product development for individual media properties like news, sports and …

In his latest column for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman argues that $20 billion in bailout money should go to venture capital firms, not auto companies. Sarah Lacy, who is blogging for TechCrunch while Michael Arrington is on vacation, couldn't disagree more. Venture capital firms don't need a bailout, she says, because "government subsidies are crutches for non-performing industries." By its very nature, Silicon Valley, the destination of a lot of venture capital money in the United States, and a place that actually celebrates when a young startup takes down an established giant, "doesn't need or want that crutch." …

Social networks have been all the rage at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Reuters reports, as wireless industry executives line up to become the new best friend of MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Handset makers and mobile operators alike understand that the "spontaneous and personal nature" of the mobile phone lends itself perfectly to social networking. For instance, CEO Chris DeWolfe points out that MySpace's mobile usage has more than quadrupled in the last year to 20 million users, out of 135 million total unique visitors. Facebook has also seen a similar leap. "This is really just the start …

Thanks to the surging popularity of smartphones like Apple's iPhone, mobile advertising has finally gotten the boost that it so badly needed. At least that's what mobile industry executives claim, speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Smartphones, they say, make surfing the Web an everyday occurrence, opening the way for advertising on phones. Another innovation, the application store-also popularized by Apple-, should become another ad revenue source for mobile phone operators and handset makers, as well as the application makers. However, operators hoping for an immediate boost to revenues "should likely not hold their breath, as analysts …

Twitter is getting almost exactly half as much press coverage as Facebook these days, according to Google Trends, even though U.S. searches for Facebook absolutely dwarf those for the microblogging service. Why are there so many more searches for Facebook? Because the social networking giant has 46 million active users in the U.S. Twitter's active user base, though undisclosed, is certainly several times smaller than that. Facebook also dwarfs Twitter in the unique user department. According to Compete, Facebook received more than 68 million unique visitors in January, compared to nearly 6 million for Twitter. So why is Twitter getting …