Northern Trust has thought very carefully about how to communicate with its wealthy clients. In the U.S., it says it has people within a 45 minute drive of 50 percent of all of the millionaire households.

It advertises on NPR, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and local newspapers.

Now it might start “friending” people on Facebook.

“We had a client earlier this year who asked if we could be a friend to their child on (her) Facebook page because the child is a beneficiary of a trust that we manage and they said what better way to get to know my child when they’re awfully remote than to do this through the Facebook page?” said Lee Woolley, President of Northern Trust Bank’s Personal Financial Services division in Boston.

The family said Facebook would be a great way to communicate with the next generation of heirs before they inherit the family fortune.

Of course the 20 year-old daughter would have to accept the invitation for it all to work out.

Woolley told the Reuters Global Wealth Management Summit his firm had said “no” in the near term, but was interested.

“We have clients spread out all over the United States of America, including Hawaii . . . and then a couple around the world as well, so yeah, the idea of using social networking sites beyond just e-mail communication is a really intriguing idea,” he said.

Of course it took the 120 year-old company more than 100 years to change its stationery.

“That was scandalous at the time,” Woolley said.

As centers of innovation go, there are worse places to place a bet on the past repeating itself than California’s technology hub. Looking beyond the Internet, housing and credit bubbles, it’s still the preferred playground of such leading financial weathervanes as venture capitalists, gizmo nerds and software studs.

Perhaps Wall Street, searching for reasons to remain optimistic about the market’s summer rally, should take heart from the spate of articles painting pictures of green shoots all over Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal’s Deal Journal notes that tech IPOs are staging a comeback, and asks if its time to party like it’s 1999?

Our reporting shows that investors, encouraged by a growing number of acquisitions and public stock flotations in the past few months, are keeping a close eye on a coterie of promising startups in Silicon Valley. David Lawsky identified six privately held companies as the ripest for acquisition or readiness to go public, out of 34 cited in industries ranging from alternative energy to social networking.

The top four are business social network LinkedIn, solar panel maker Solyndra, smart grid company Silver Spring, and Zynga, a casual games company whose products run on social networks like Facebook. Two others are Guidewire, which makes software for property and casualty companies, and LiveOps, which runs call centers using private contractors who work from home.

But he reports that the Silicon Valley Six say they intend to keep growing organically rather than agreeing to be acquired or go public during the recession. Recession or no, there is clearly plenty of money looking for a ride. That’s the thing about bubbles; they tend to be more fun when you catch them early.

Microsoft/Yahoo, Samsung/SanDisk, Electronic Arts/Take-Two....Facebook/Twitter?

According to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Facebook had talked for several weeks about buying micro-blogging site Twitter for $500 million in stock, and then gave up on the idea about three weeks ago.

The sticking point apparently was price -- whether the deal valued Facebook shares too highly. "But, more important, it seems, was a feeling among Twitter investors and execs that the start-up should still take a shot at building its revenues-there are none right now-as well as it had done at building its growth," Swisher writes.

But she notes that Twitter needs all the investors it can get, and while the lack of revenue was an issue for Facebook, it may revisit the deal at another time. "We'd hate to see Twitter go to another company," like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Verizon, she said, citing an unnamed source.

Keep an eye on:

• CNN"s famous foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour to anchor her own news show next year (New York Times)
• Six Apart offers journalist bailout plan in the form of a free blogging account for up to 30 laid-off journalists. But almost 300 have applied (New York Times)
• US TV viewing on home TVs, the Internet, and mobile phones grew in Q3 with average viewing of 142 hours/month at home, 2 and a half hours on the Web and 3 hours on mobile phones (Nielsen)

Banks financing the $34.8 billion private equity buyout of BCE have been hammering away all weekend to win higher interest rates, tighter loan restrictions and stronger protections that far exceed the original terms, according to the New York Times. Citing people on both sides of the transaction, the paper said talks began to fray late on Friday but lasted all weekend. “It’s patently obvious that the banks have no intention of closing the deal,” said one executive who read the revised terms. Investors have long worried that the massive private equity buyout might be repriced, delayed or abandoned altogether. Looming over the discussions is the spectre of the Clear Channel deal, in which some of the very same lenders also tried to back out, producing an ugly tangle of court cases that was only resolved last week.

Microsoft said it proposed an alternative deal to Yahoo rather than a full acquisition, but a person who knows the mind of Carl Icahn, the man driving trying to unseat Yahoo’s board, said the move was likely to prompt the billionaire investor to nudge Yahoo back toward Google. This source isn’t just familiar with the matter, but has a taste for rustic allusions: “Microsoft is trying to get the milk without buying the cow, and if you look at Icahn’s history, he has never been used that way.” Microsoft did not clarify what that alternative deal might be.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed his company’s independent spirit, after a report said the social networking site might be sold to software giant Microsoft, which is hunting for ways to beef up its Internet business. “You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term,” Zuckerberg told Reuters while in Japan to launch a Japanese language version of Facebook. Microsoft already has a small stake and the Wall Street Journal said this month the software giant, with the Yahoo deal in limbo, had approached Facebook to gauge its interest in a full takeover.

U.S. diversified manufacturer Manitowoc has increased its bid for British kitchen equipment maker Enodis to $2.1 billion to trump a rival offer. Manitowoc, which makes cranes and restaurant equipment, said it was offering 294 pence a share for Enodis, topping an agreed bid of 282 pence a share from U.S. rival Illinois Tool Works. The offer from ITW beat an earlier bid of 260 pence a share from Manitowoc. Enodis, which makes fryers for fast food groups such as McDonald’s and Burger King, will also pay an interim dividend of 2 pence a share.

Other deals of the day:

* The direct banking arm of Dutch financial services group ING Group is offering 416 million euros ($644 million) in cash for Germany’s Interhyp to expand its global business.

* France’s PSA Peugeot Citroen said it would invest between 300 million euros and 350 million euros ($467.9-545.9 million) in a Russian joint venture with Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors Corp.

* The Czech government will demand at least 100 billion crowns ($6.2 billion) from the winning bidder for Prague Airport, Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek said in a newspaper interview.

* Cyprus Trading Corp agreed to buy up to 50 percent of local mobile telephone operator Areeba Ltd from South Africa’s MTN, CTC said.

Dan Primack of Thomson Reuters’ PE Hub takes a look at the implications of the $240 million that Microsoft invested in Facebook last year:

The WSJ recently reported that Microsoft is sniffing around Facebook, less than seven months after investing $240 million in the social network at a $15 billion valuation. It was largely discounted as the hopeful fumblings of Steve Ballmer, in his search for a rebound acquisition after being dumped by Yahoo. But it got me to thinking: Microsoft’s initial investment may be one of the worst venture capital deals of all time.

Click here to read the full article.

On a related note, check out this uncomfortably literal depiction of Facebook from BBC’s “The Wall.”