Social networking site, twitter.com rejected a $500 million takeover offer from another social networking giant Facebook.com yesterday. The offer was $100 million in cash and the rest in stock. According to Kara Swisher, Twitter rejected the offer because:

"-Facebook’s real valuation made the amount to only $150 million

-Twitter’s investors wanted cash

-Twitter has a secret plan to be announced next year for revenue"

The real question is: What does twitter have in store? Sure, Facebook may have inflated their numbers a little, but hey, times are tough and $500 million is still half a billion!

Zivity, aka "Myspace for porn addicts", has recently laid off a full 1/3rd of it’s staff. Who says the sex industry is recession proof? Wait, has anyone ever said that? It’s not as if the site employs thousands of people though. They cut back from 22 employees to 14.

The adult social networking site describes itself as a "community-powered showcase of female beauty.” This means you make a profile and then use it to gawk at girls when you should be getting something productive done. So, almost exactly like Myspace/Facebook then.

All doesn’t look bleak for the site though. They’ve secured 8 million in capitol and they recently hired Napster’s Jordan Ritter as their CTO. The site is still in private beta, however. Look for it to go public in the first quarter of 2009.

Belkin’s been making some nice gear lately, and this beauty joins the best of it. The N1 Vision wireless router supports 802.11n draft 2.0, as well as /b and /g (but no /a), but its the LCD that shows network performance that tickles my fancy. It can display overall network performance, as well as utilization by host. Nifty. Pricing? Heck, who cares about pricing?

PageFlakes has unleashed its Blizzard release of new features involving social networking and customizable themes on pages.

Now there are “themeable” public pages and members can create their own Pagecasts – USA Today, Rolling Stone, CNN, WashingtonPost, Newsweek Interactive, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, Slate, AOL, Die Welt, Bild and others.

Like widgets? Pageflakes has a ton (like 236,997 of them!) and new users will like the auto-customization that lets them create their own page quickly based on a few questions.

Microsoft attempts to expand into the Internet to give a fully rounded system to its customers. The company will offer online services including e-mail and Web search under its Windows Live brand, as well test versions of two new free services: Windows Live Folders and Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a new version of the photo application found on Microsoft’s two most recent operating systems, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It simplifies how people can share photos on their Windows Live Spaces site, Microsoft’s social networking platform.

The sharing feature of Microsoft’s new Photo Gallery is similar to how users can publish pictures from Apple Inc.’s iPhoto application to the company’s .Mac online service.

Microsoft’s effort might pay off in the next few months, but if it seriously expects to compete head-to-head with the likes of Google and Yahoo, then Microsoft might just find the whole experience a bit lacking.