DealZone

Facebook is likely to go public sometime after late 2012, a board member said. A stock market debut by a company valued in the tens of billions of dollars would be one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings of the decade. *View article

Andrew Ross Sorkin from The New York Times takes a look at the secondary market’s implied market value for Facebook. Will Facebook ultimately be worth $33 billion or $3 billion? *View NYT article

Southwest Airlines’ $1.4 billion AirTran Holdings deal pays for itself, writes columnist Robert Cyran. *View article *Further reading

AOL has been in deal talks with TechCrunch, the WSJ reports. *View WSJ article

Google has invested as much as $200 million in social gaming company Zynga, as it looks to bolster its presence in the world of online gaming, according to technology blog TechCrunch.

According to TechCrunch, the investment may have been in conjunction with Softbank Capital's deal to purchase a stake in Zynga, which makes games for social networks including Facebook and MySpace and profits by selling virtual goods.  In June, Nikkei reported that Softbank bought a stake in Zynga for about 13.5 billion yen ($147.4 million) through a private placement.

The site said that The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures and that Zynga will be "the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year." Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be $350 million, half of which is operating profit, and is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011, according to the site.

******We sprinkled updates into this blog. We're highlighting them like this.******Thanks to TechCrunch, U.S. tech reporters are about to spend another weekend working instead of playing. UPDATE: Or maybe Kara Swisher at All Things D will save them!******Two sources told proprietor Michael Arrington that Google "is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter." He wrote:***

We don't know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

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Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can't be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

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Why would Google want Twitter? We've been arguing for some time that Twitter's real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn't even have a horse in the game.