One of the companies paying close attention to the Facebook IPO is San Francisco based Twitter. Having launched in 2006, the company is starting to mature itself in the same way that Facebook has over the past two years, business wise.

With Dick Costolo on board as Twitter’s CEO, the company is making a bee-line for media partnerships and advertisers, growing out the amount of sponsored content on the site rapidly.

During an interview with CNBC today, Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley shared that the company isn’t thinking about an IPO right now:

Benchmark’s @bgurley: Twitter is not thinking about IPO

— CNBC (@CNBC) February 3, 2012

Gurley and Benchmark are investors in Twitter, and his remarks are certainly timely, given that Facebook is now in its quiet period awaiting its public offering. While Twitter might not be thinking about going public at the moment, it is certainly watching how everything goes with Facebook’s attempt to raise $5B.

How it all goes for Facebook is extremely important to Twitter and its investors, as it will be the first real test of how a social property used by millions to connect with one another is received in the open market.

Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders gave us insight on how the company will position itself for years to come. Zuckerberg mentioned Facebook’s impact on the economy and how connecting people with businesses is important for global economic growth. Those are the types of visions that publicly traded companies have to have, and it will be interesting to watch Twitter grow up and take hold of its own grand vision and path to revenue.

When it comes to vision, Twitter is in a good spot by having Jack Dorsey back in the mix as Chairman. He’s always been the one who sees Twitter as something much more than micro-blogging. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a letter from Dorsey accompanying an S-1 filing one day.

You may be tired of all of the Facebook chatter and stats after the company filed its S-1 paperwork to go public yesterday. Whether you’re FB’d out or not, this might get your attention.

Hitwise has pulled some really powerful stats about Facebook’s first month of 2012, and it’s really impressive stuff.

Ready for this?

• Facebook.com captures one in every eleven Internet visits in the US
• 1 in every 5 page views occurs on Facebook.com
• The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes
• “Facebook” is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks.
• Facebook.com users are highly loyal to the website; 96% of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012

These are absolutely astronomical numbers and facts, especially the bit about 1 in every 5 page views occurring on Facebook. What these stats tell us is that the News Feed and Ticker changes the company has introduced at the F8 conference are working and keeping people on the site as they are intended to do.

For example, by sharing what you’re listening to on Spotify with all of your friends without having to click a button means that everyone is interacting more by doing even less. With all of that extra time, you’re now discovering new content and spending more time on Facebook.

The scary part is that as more people start setting up their Timeline on Facebook, the time on site will increase even more. I personally haven’t been going back and filling out life events from the past, but I’ve seen others doing it by ways of posts on my News Feed. If that trend continues, people will literally spend hours of their time just giving Facebook every piece of data they have on themselves.

If you were wondering why the company could be worth upwards of $100B, now you know.

Today, Facebook filed its S-1 paperwork to take the company public, and along with the filing came a letter from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the letter, Zuckerberg discusses how important the connections that his company is making are. Along with social connections, Facebook’s CEO points out that connecting consumers to businesses can have a big impact on the global economy:

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

Of course most people won’t put down a lot of money to invest in a company that lets you poke your friends, so the company mission will start to become clearer as we get closer to May, when the company will start being publicly traded. It’s no accident that Facebook is starting to sound more like a grown-up company than ever before. Connecting the world is no small task, and Facebook hopes that its $5B IPO will help them get there.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s letter in its entirety:

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

According to a report by Reuters, Facebook will file initial paperwork for its public offering tomorrow, seeking to raise $5B in its IPO bid.

While its no surprise that Facebook is making the move to go public, it was originally thought that the company would seek $10B in public funding. According to the same report, Morgan Stanley has grabbed the lead bookrunner role, with Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and JP Morgan finishing off the total of six initial bookrunners.

With former Facebook President Sean Parker suggesting that Facebook’s offering could be the largest offering in history, it seems as if Facebook is playing it safe if the company decides to opt for less funding, thus giving up less of the company.

If paperwork is filed tomorrow as expected, the timeline puts Facebook’s public offering on slate for mid-May, and the company is reportedly going to trade under the ticker name “FB”. Once all is said and done, the company could have a valuation of anywhere between $75B-$100B.

Once the company files its S-1 paperwork to go public, it will have to enter a mandated quiet period, so it looks like Open Graph and Timeline are the last few products we’ll see from the company until May.

With many suggesting that Facebook could go public as early as Monday of next week, people are already starting to look ahead at what the next hot things will be to invest in. Not that going public is the end of the line for former Facebook President Sean Parker, who was mum on the IPO details yesterday, but huge exits for those that have invested big in Facebook are expected.

One of those who should see big returns is founder of Digital Sky Technologies, Yuri Milner. The firm was a part of a $500M direct investment into Facebook last January. Bloomberg discussed Facebook’s impending IPO with Yuri Milner and asked him point blank if he’d be inclined to cash out and take his money elsewhere. Milner replied and shed some light on his long-term investment strategies at DST:

Another significant ingredient of our strategy is really stick with the founders as long as they’re pushing the envelope, and pretty much all of them are really doing that, and we don’t really have a reason to exit at this point.

Watch the full interview below:

Along with Facebook, other Digital Sky Technologies investments include; Spotify, Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, and Groupon. Needless to say, Milner is someone who we can trust as a gauge of what’s next in technology. And according to him, countries like China are going to skip physical stores altogether and go right to the web:

If I can make a forecast, the Wal-Mart of China is actually going to be an online company.

Former President of Facebook, Sean Parker, did an interview with CNBC today in which he discussed Facebook’s “inevitable” IPO and applauded Mark Zuckerberg for keeping the company private for as long as he has. While Parker didn’t provide any insight as to when the public offering would be made or at what valuation, he did admit that the public push for Facebook shares can’t be ignored:

To the extent that there is any bubble in technology at all, it is really a bubble around Facebook in the sense that there is a huge amount of pent-up demand among retail investors for access to Facebook equity.

Our sources say that the IPO could happen as early as next Monday, but it’s anyone’s guess at this point.

In the interview below, Parker discusses how ironic it is that Zynga, which has found success with its games by piggybacking Facebook’s social graph, went public before Facebook did.

Notice that the interview started to go south when questions about Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of him in “The Social Network” started being asked. Let’s keep it to tech folks, shall we?

This year will be forever remembered as the year that we lost the most creative mind that Silicon Valley has ever seen, as well as one where a few rough Tech IPOs scared away potential future investors. We also said goodbye to some CEOs and tech founders, and Facebook stayed in the social networking driver’s seat.

Lets get into the year that was in Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs

What can we say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said? The founder and most memorable leader of Apple resigned as CEO in August, making way for the Tim Cook era. In his resignation letter, Jobs didn’t give an actual reason for leaving Apple, but suggested that Apple move on with its succession plan:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Many assumed that the reason for Jobs stepping down was his failing health, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case when he passed away on October 6th. As a Silicon Valley icon, Steve Jobs brought Apple back to life, which launched the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 this year, showing that hard work and determination can indeed pay off. Even after his death, Jobs continued to make headlines, with his biography shattering records and topping charts.

Read all about Apple’s entire 2011 in our rewind.

IPOs

2011 was a big year for going public in the tech space. With much of the year being filled with rumblings about whether Facebook would go public or not, four other companies took the huge step of going for the IPO.

Here’s a timeline of big-name 2011 IPO filings:

• January: LinkedIn found a way to make money, so the time came to go public.
• February: Pandora went from nearly being toast, to becoming to the toast of tech.
• June: Groupon took the world by storm with its group buying model, but is the sizzle gone?
• July: Zynga relies heavily on Facebook for its revenue and game players, but that didn’t stop them from going for the IPO hailmary.

Unfortunately, most of these public offerings ended up tanking, but that shouldn’t stop companies from taking the leap next year.

Facebook and Yelp are the two companies to watch out for in IPO land next year.

Silicon Shuffles

A few major notable founders and CEOs left or were booted from their positions in 2011. Some of them included companies that were synonymous with “Web 2.0″, which was the beginning of the social web.

In March, Kevin Rose decided to resign from the company he started in 2004, Digg. After a short stint as CEO of the company in 2010, Rose decided to give the big goodbye to Digg this year. In many ways, Kevin Rose was a symbol of how cool it was to be an Internet entrepreneur, serving as a way more social and popular version of Mark Zuckerberg. His resignation came after an unsuccessful attempt to revive Digg’s community with a new version that everyone ended up hating. Don’t worry about Rose, he got funding for his new startup, Milk.

In September, Carol Bartz was fired as CEO of Yahoo!, over the phone no less. With Yahoo! seemingly having no leadership or direction, the rest of the year was filled with speculation on when Yahoo! would sell, and who it would sell to. Some of the names thrown around? Google, Microsoft, Aol, and Alibaba. No sale yet, and don’t hold your breath in 2012.

HP, which Steve Jobs had noted was “being dismembered, destroyed” fired its CEO this year, Leo Apotheker. However, Apotheker’s tenure didn’t even last a year and was replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

But it wasn’t all about high profile departures, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey came back to the company in March to split time as an adviser as well as CEO of his Valley startup Square, putting 8 hour days in at both companies.

Facebook gets competition, remains king of social

The existence of a Google social network had been rumored for years, but this year we finally got to see what the company had come up with. In a huge direction change for the company, Google has decided to go all-in with social by launching Google+. In doing that, it shut down previous social failure Google Buzz.

Even though Google+ shows strong growth, Facebook remained the king of social in 2011. The company told us that they had 800 million users, but what was more impressive, it had 500 million users on the site at once.

Facebook didn’t stand pat amidst numerous privacy issues and launched numerous new features this year including Timeline. But what made Facebook the real king of Silicon Valley in 2011? The fact that it could bank 1 billion dollars in net revenue this year. Growth in users is one thing, features are another, but bringing in that type of bank puts it light-years ahead of Valley darlings like Twitter.

These are the stories that in one way or another narrated the entire year of innovation in 2011 on the left coast. What were your most memorable moments in Silicon Valley this year? Share them in the comments!

Zynga went public today as you might have heard, raising one billion dollars in its public offering. There are mixed reviews on how trading is playing out for Zynga at this point. Regardless, the company is basically printing money at this point and may have a certain number of users to thank for it.

In this fascinating (and somewhat scary) interview with Bloomberg, the developer of Mafia Wars, Roger Dickey, reveals that some users have spent thousands of dollars playing and upgrading their way through Zynga’s games.

Dickey says:

You have some players that spend thousands, even north of $10,000 a month on the game. I’m not sure where those people get that money.

During a Black Friday sale for Mafia Wars in 2009, some users spent $50,000 in one day. A piece:

People were wiring money to Zynga. Not even spending it through PayPal because they were going over the spending limits that PayPal even allowed.

Watch the full interview below:

Some sources have told us that Zynga doesn’t release a game that costs less than $75,000 to beat if you were to pay your way through it. While most Zynga players opt to play for free by pestering their Facebook friends for interactions that allow them to water things, having some players who spend thousands on these games certainly doesn’t hurt the company.

Maybe some of those users should buy stock in Zynga, since they can now.

You’re hungry, and you want to join an exciting small team working on a project that could or could not change the universe. The company can’t pay you a lot of money because it hasn’t raised much yet, but they will offer you equity to make up for it.

Wow, owning a percentage of a company? That’s awesome.

Not so fast, there’s a lot to learn when it comes to what all of the different stock options and shares means.

David Weekly has come up with a document that I like to call “Startup Equity for Dummies”. Not that we’re dummies, because this tangled world of equity, stocks, and options even trip up the smartest of MBAs. He calls it “An Introduction to Stock & Options”.

Written in a way that even my mom could understand, David Weekly’s work is a must-print-and-read if you’re thinking of starting your own company, or joining a startup.

When will Facebook finally IPO?????

David Weekly breaks down what an “IPO” actually is, since a lot of the armchair quarterbacks seem to think it’s a process that starts with a magical fairy flicking a wand:

When the company “goes public” and has an “Initial Public Offering” (IPO), it creates some new Common stock that it sells to investment banks called underwriters that in turn sell the stock to members of the general public or other investors. Done well, this process generates a bunch of cash that the company can use to grow, and the company’s employees can sell some of their stock on the market after a brief “lockup” period.

Even I can understand that.

David Weekly teaches us the difference between common and preferred stock, what a board actually does, breaks down the different types of investors, and dips into liquidity events.

So if you’re ready to move to Silicon Valley and live the “dream”, give this priceless PDF a read first.

➤ An Introduction to Stock & Options (PDF)

I met with one of Tudou’s founders, Marc van der Chijs, now CEO of Spil Games Asia, for coffee and a chat in Spil’s offices in a converted warehouse beside Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek.  Originally from the Netherlands, Marc first came to China in 1999 as a senior controller for Daimler-Benz’ China operations. He left Daimler-Benz soon after to work as an independent consultant.  Marc was unable to discuss Tudou’s upcoming IPO during our meeting because of the public filing.

Instead, our chat focused on Spil Games and the issues that all web startups have with monetizing their sites. We also discussed Marc’s work as an Angel Investor, with Shanghai based technology startups.

Spil Games

Spil Games are one of the world’s leading online gaming companies with 47 websites running fully localised content in 19 languages and serving over 4000 games to upwards of 130 million unique visitors per month. Their games target web and mobile users. Marc explained that, while most of their existing games use Adobe Flash they are now creating their games in HTML 5 to enable them to reach the broadest possible audience and allow them to run on Apple iOS devices reaching a significant proportion of the mobile market. He can envisage a time when HTML 5 takes over as the predominant platform for web and mobile gaming.   Spil are actively promoting the technology with others  by a HTML5 game jam that they organized together with Google in both Hilversum and Mountain View.  So far, most of their titles are single player but, with the rise in social gaming, especially on the mobile platforms, they are finding their output in those genres increasing.

I asked Marc the question on the minds of all web startup developers, how do you monetize your sites? Marc responded, that, at Spil Games, with 130 million visitors per month, advertising revenue is clearly a significant income generator, however, there are many users who ignore advertising, or indeed, don’t even see it. The real growth in monetization is in micropayments and advertising within games. Many game fans, once hooked, are willing to make a small payment for a level up or to buy some item within a game. Micropayments for in-game upgrades are not yet the largest income generator for online games but it is a growing slice of the pie and could soon overtake banner advertising as an income source.

The trick, of course, with all web content, is to “keep it fresh” that means update daily and, for games sites, introduce at least one new game every week. Otherwise, your readership and members are not going return.

Angel Investing

I first came to know of Marc van der Chijs through his Twitter account @chijs. On his twitter profile he describes himself as an “Angel Investor” I wasn’t entirely sure of the distinction between angel investors and venture capitalists so I asked Marc to clarify for me. The distinction as very simple, Venture Capitalists are usually companies where Angel Investors are typically people who may not have as much to invest. However, the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, especially with the emergence of Super Angels, Angel investors who have larger amounts of money to invest.

Marc continued, that he focused his investments on local Shanghainese technology startups but that he had reduced his investment activity recently, mainly because there were simply too many companies approaching him, but, also because many local startups are focusing on the Chinese market only instead of taking a broader global perspective.

One local startup that Marc has invested in that he does believe can have a global impact, although he was quick to point out that he is also a co-founder, is unitedstyles.com, a personalized kids online fashion site that will go live (in beta) on November 15th.