Stock Trading in Private Companies Draws S.E.C. Scrutiny

BY PETER LATTMAN

Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A red-hot trading market has developed in the shares of the world’s leading social networking companies: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and LinkedIn. What is unusual is that none of the companies are listed on a public stock exchange. Each is privately held.

Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to learn more about the business of these stock trades. The agency has sent information requests to several participants in the buying and selling of stock in these four companies, according to two people with direct knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.

It is unclear exactly what has piqued the agency’s interest. An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment on the matter. But the S.E.C.’s interest comes as a crop of new exchanges is popping up to facilitate these trades.

At the same time, Wall Street brokerage firms have begun forming investment pools to buy these companies’ shares.Over the last year, several private exchanges have matched up buyers and sellers of shares in these fast-growing companies. Though the volume remains thin, the number of transactions is increasing each month.

Driving this activity is the social networking phenomenon, which has created the hottest, and most hyped, segment in Silicon Valley in years.

Businesses like Facebook, the social networking leader, and Zynga, a popular maker of online games, already generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Twitter has more than 150 million users, and just received $200 million in venture financing. LinkedIn, another social networking site, has become a Facebook for professionals.


Read more.

and more...

Library of Congress Will Save Tweets

Lifted straight out of NyTimes.com

By STEVE LOHR

Published: April 14, 2010

Not everyone would think that the actor Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter musings on his daily doings constitute part of “the universal body of human knowledge.”

But the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, thinks so.

The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.

Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the library’s embrace of digital media. Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”

Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

read more here