Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday reiterated that advertising remains the core revenue source for the 5-year-old social network, which is on track to increase sales by 70% this year. Zuckerberg said Facebook works with more than 70% of the top 100 largest advertisers in the United States, and that the company was seeing fast growth in international markets, where it is creating a direct sales staff. He added that the company could one day develop a type of advertising network by increasingly making aspects of its service available on other sites. "You can see over time …

Google co-founder Larry Page thinks there ought to be more debate around storing user data, which he says can be beneficial for users. "More dialogue is needed [with EU regulators]," Page told journalists at a Google event in the UK. He said Google's ability to predict things like pandemics would not be possible if it had to delete search data after six months, as the EU wants. "When we released data about Mexico flu trends we had a whole debate," he said. "We were worried we would cause panic. But we decided the benefits outweighed the cost." …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently hinted that Twitter and Google could forge some kind of partnership, whereby Twitter feeds would be indexed by the search giant. Schmidt, speaking to reporters following the company's annual Zeitgeist conference, noted that Google wouldn't necessarily have to buy Twitter, either: "We do not have to buy everyone to work with them," he said. Google has been rumored as a potential acquirer of Twitter, which is considered the leader in real-time search. Co-founder Larry Page added that Google needs to learn from Twitter. He said the search giant has so far "done …

At its search press conference on Tuesday, Yahoo announced a series of search features built around an idea with a terrible slogan: "WOO," which is supposed to demonstrate that the Internet is a "Web of Objects, not pages." As Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson says, "Look, we're sure WOO represents fantastic leaps forward, but the problem with Yahoo trying to innovate its way out of second place in search is that the appeal of search is that it is stupid simple." Indeed, searching for something on the Web is as easy as going to Google, typing in …

Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget points out that part of the reason Silicon Valley is struggling is because there's no longer an IPO market for startups. This makes it difficult for VCs to exit investments, particularly during a recession when nobody's buying. One of the reasons the IPO market is dead is Sarbanes-Oxley, says Blodget: "Why spend millions of extra dollars a year complying with a law that won't make your investors the tiniest bit safer and might get you thrown in jail for life if you blow a quarter? "SARBOX should be rewritten …

Sources tell TechCrunch that Facebook turned down a new $200 million round of venture funding that would value the company at $8 billion. The blog also claims that the social networking giant has also received another term sheet valuing it at $6 billion. According to the sources, Facebook declined the $8 billion term sheet because it came with the requirement of a board of director's seat. Michael Arrington notes that board of director's seats have been a touchy subject in the past for Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has three common stock board seats; one he holds, one …

Google is addressing the problem of employee turnover in a typically Google way: by using an algorithm. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports that the search giant has begun taking data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories and crunching them into a mathematical formula that identifies which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit. Among the inputs are surveys and peer reviews, which Google says helps identify employees who feel underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving the company. According to the Journal, applying a complex equation to solve a human …

It looks as though MySpace's last stronghold in social networking is about to fall, as Facebook creeps up on its No. 1 position in the U.S., says TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Only one year ago it seemed that Facebook would need more than four years to catch up to MySpace in the U.S., but today that has changed, as Facebook has surged to 61 million unique users compared to MySpace's 70 million. Losing the U.S. user war is certainly a big problem, but Arrington says an even bigger concern for the News Corp. company is the rate at …