One story that’s capturing a lot of attention today is Facebook surpassing Google in time spent on site in the U.S. Silicon Alley Insider has a chart illustrating as much. 

Things have been a little slow on the fbFund front this year. The site hasn’t posed an update since January, and you probably won’t be hearing about new ventures anytime soon.

Inside Facebook reports that fbFund appears to be "mothballed". fbFund is a seed fund and joint venture run by Facebook Founders Fund and Accel Partners. Investment capital for the fund was provided by these entities.

Ad.ly announced today that it has launched its in-stream monetization platform for apps and websites. This means that apps or sites that publish streams from any source (like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) can use Ad.ly’s API to serve contextually and locally targeted ads based on streams they are reading and where they’re located. The platform is called Ad.ly for Apps.

Foursquare has announced that it’s closed a new $20m Series B round of funding with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and new partner, Andreessen Horowitz.

Early in the week, Twitter revealed its new "Promoted Tweets" feature, or ad platform (though the company doesn’t like calling it this), and essentially its long awaited business model. The jury is still out on how successful a business model this will be, but it’s already created a huge amount of buzz, and Twitter has grown enormously up until this point without a business model.

The initial submissions of session suggestions for the Interactive portion of SXSW that made the first cut have been published. Now it’s up to the voting public to decide which sessions make it next. I’ve heard a bit of feedback from last year’s attendees on the quality of content in the search engine optimization sessions, so it will be nice to see what makes it this year.

I’ve been (personally) using Twitter more frequently lately because more people I know are using it. 

Not sure how many people really care where I’m having dinner.  But, I figure there are many more people interested in startups.  So, I’ve kicked off a Twitter account for OnStartups.

If you are interested in getting pithy insights, quick tips and short quips On Startups on Twitter, follow OnStartups on Twitter:  

We know, we know – it’s almost March.  But a story a story relating to what ended a few months ago just emerged, and it turns out that in comparison to 2006, the number of German Internet companies created in 2007 more than tripled.

A recent article by Zoli Erdos really got me to thinking about startup hiring. The article was titled "Startups: Executive Hiring Challenges or Beware of the Suits".

If you’ve ever trained a newbie, you know that there’s a lot of routine stuff you’ll sigh your way through.  Questions or comments may bring up entirely new ideas, however, and it’s for this reason that many businesses, whether they’re new or old, can learn from tips for startups.

I’ve been reading startup blogs for as long as there have been startup blogs.

I’m a fan of Joel Spolsky.  I’m impressed with his wit and humor.  Some of his older stuff was really good, but most of his newer stuff just hasn’t struck me in the same way.  But, maybe that’s just me.

I’m a fan of Paul Graham.  I’m impressed with his intelligence and ability to really cover a topic well in a way that makes sense and appeals to my analytical side.