MediaFile

Even at a difficult moment, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone managed to be witty.

It fell to Stone to write about the hacker who broke in to the company’s computers and stole sensitive business information. His blog on the matter — the official statement from Twitter — was dubbed “Twitter, even more open than we wanted.”

Someone sent a trove of the Twitter documents to the Silicon Valley website TechCrunch. Stone’s blog clarified puzzling statements on TechCrunch that seemed to point toward Google Docs as the problem.  Said Stone: “This has nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use.”

That must have come as a welcome relief at Google, which had been trying to explain the robustness of its security even as press agents for obscure security experts sent emails to suggest otherwise, so their clients would get a mention.

Stone said Twitter’s difficulties are an object lesson in the importance of having strong passwords. TechCrunch took some pleasure in asserting that the password for Twitter servers was the word “password.”

So, the public got its first titillating glance at privately held Twitter’s (out of date) cost and revenue numbers, which Stone likened to getting a look at the inside of someone’s underwear drawer, quoting someone else:

Taking a break from flogging the latest tired media business model, Morgan Stanley published a short report on Friday entitled, “How Teenagers Consume Media” by 15-year-old summer intern Matthew Robson that offers a frank discussion of what young digital media consumers are up to.  The FT has highlighted it on its front page, perhaps as an antidote to wall-to-wall coverage of the annual Sun Valley media moguls conference in recent days.

The most memorable moment in the report is its discussion of the irrelevancy of Twitter to teenagers:

Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale.
On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

Social media is a big topic of discussion at Sun Valley. And Google, the king of Internet search, has been talking to the various players.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on Thursday that he’s “chatted” with the MySpace folks while at the conference, and noted that Google has had many conversations with Twitter in the past.

Google’s $900 million advertising deal with MySpace will expire next year. Some analysts believe any new deal will involve Google paying considerably less money to run ads on MySpace, whose popularity been eclipsed by Facebook.

Spotting which executives are talking to each other is the No.1 spectator sport among the reporters at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, where dealmaking is always in the air. And the action on Thursday did not disappoint.

The man pictured on the left, of course, is Google co-founder Larry Page. The backside of the right-hand dome belongs to Twitter CEO Evan Williams. The pair appeared to be deep in discussion in the conference’s private lunch garden on Thursday.

Twitter is the fast-growing microblogging site that was previously rumored to have been in acquisition discussions with Google. Twitter has repeatedly said that it wants to remain independent and that it’s not for sale. Was Williams telling Page the same thing in Sun Valley?

As the Chinese government worked to regain control of the streets on Wednesday following ethnic clashes in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, Facebook reported some problems with its service, even as Beijing moved to suppress anger and dissent that is simmering online.

“We’ve heard reports of access issues and the service does appear to be running slowly. We’re looking into the matter,” a Facebook spokesman said via email, without elaborating.

On Tuesday, access to Facebook also seemed to be disrupted in some places, although the company maintained it was not seeing any changes in traffic. Still, users in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and Chongqing said they could not reach the site. In addition, access to Twitter was apparently blocked and search restrictions for Xinjiang topics were in place on Twitter’s Chinese rival, Fanfou.com.

Corrects blog post to show Buffett was talking about YouTube, not Facebook.

Attention YouTube: Warren Buffett wants to give you money.

That’s the word from Liberty Media Chairman John Malone, who sat on a panel about digital media at the Allen & Co confab in Sun Valley on Tuesday.

Malone told reporters on the sidelines of the event that billionaire investor Buffet, aka the Oracle of Omaha, had told him privately that he would be willing to pay $5 a month to use YouTube, the popular video site owned by Google.

YouTube, of course, is a free Web service which makes its money through advertising. But other popular social media like Twitter have yet to generate revenue, and monetizing social networks is a big topic of discussion among the media and tech executives gathered for the conference.

Allen & Co’s Sun Valley media and technology conference forbids journalists from attending the morning sessions that executives and other media power players attend before they go out to play and talk about deals in the afternoon. That means the last, best hope they have is to get the low-down from a journalist who was invited.

There’s no pride in it, but at least you hear what happened from a reliable source.

In this case, that’s Ken Auletta, New Yorker media writer and author of several books about the media business. He moderated a panel about surviving in the digital age.

Reuters reporters Robert MacMillan, Yinka Adegoke and Alexei Oreskovic will be sending live updates from the Sun Valley gathering. Read their updates below or follow us on Twitter.

Cola rivals Coke and Pepsi gave their long-standing feud a rest last week after a user-provoked experiment on Twitter prompted the two pop makers to trade friendly greetings on the popular social networking service.

Coca-Cola responded first to a clever user's message suggesting that the two make nice on Twitter, offering "A gracious (yet competitive) hello" to Pepsi. In return, Pepsi extended a Twitter-style olive branch of sorts to its competitor: "Can rivals and tweeps coexist? We're willing to find out. :)" Tweeps, for those unversed in the lingo, is a cutesy term for Twitter users.

The whole episode began with the single Twitter message sent by a digital media consultant from a web marketing firm called Amnesia Razorfish based in Sydney, Australia, but quickly grew as other users got in on the fun and repeated (or "retweeted") the message to their own friends and followers across the social network.

Facebook has a new question for its users: Who do you want to tell?

The social network is revamping its publishing and privacy capabilities, giving individuals greater control about who sees the status updates, photos and messages they post on the service.

Facebook announced the new features, which are currently in beta testing, in a blog post on Wednesday. The changes provide greater control to limit who sees particular content – pictures of the kids can be viewable by a customized list of family members as opposed to someone’s broader group of Facebook friends.

But the real significance of the move may be in encouraging Facebook users to share their messages with the world at large instead of only with their group of approved group of friends.