In an interview with BusinessWeek, Facebook investor Peter Thiel acknowledges for the first time publicly that the social networking giant tried to buy Twitter for $500 million last year. Ultimately, he says, the talks broke down as the parties disagreed over price and structure. "The deal would have to be done with Facebook stock," said Thiel. "And then you have to figure out how much the stock is worth." Indeed, determining Facebook's true value is a matter of some debate, writes BusinessWeek's Spencer E. Ante. Microsoft may have bought a 1.6% stake at a $15 billion valuation in 2007, …

Wired contributor Sam Gustin, who has been exploring the economic meltdown's impact on Silicon Valley, interviews Google's Chief Information Evangelist Vint Cerf, who talks about Google's role in the recovery, the best use of the government's stimulus dollars and why we can't count on private or venture capital for innovation in the near-term. But you can count on Google for innovation, Cerf says, listing energy, health care and education as three areas the search giant will be focusing its R&D efforts. Cerf notes that Google tools like Apps for Education and Google Earth are increasingly being used in classrooms today. …

The proliferation of Web 2.0 services like Twitter has led to the rise of the "brandividual," or the marketer who uses these tools to further his own brand as well as that of the company he works for, writes Advertising Age's Abby Klaasen. Ford Motor Company's Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager Scott Monty is one example, claims Advertising Age's contributor David Armano, in a blog post blog post. "For some, the idea is scary -- the melding of our personalities with the companies and brands we work for," Armano writes. "Call it whatever you want; I believe we'll …

Despite the recent slashing of growth estimates by several research firms, online advertising is not in recession, asserts Adweek's Brian Morrissey -- at least, not according to the classical definition of a recession, qualified as three consecutive quarters of negative growth. It may be headed that way, however, as forecaster IDC predicted last week that the sector would contract 5%, which would mark the first quarterly decline since the dot com bust back in 2001. To be sure, direct response tactics like search and performance-based marketing remain in high demand, but display advertising is struggling. Morrissey points out that graphical …

Corporations have increasingly turned to Twitter as a means of communicating with their customers, particularly for monitoring what is being said about their brands. As such, when Twitter finally turns its attention to monetization, it will likely look to brand marketers first. Even so, Advertising Age's Michael Learmonth doesn't think selling marketing services to corporate America is "the kind of Google-scale business Twitter's founders and backers are banking on." Rather, Learmonth, like search guru John Battelle, thinks Twitter will focus on search. Last summer, the microblogging sensation bought the search engine Summarize, and it has recently started integrating search into …