Twitter is in the news for two different, but possibly related stories. First, sources are reporting that the network is close to “completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.”

Second, TechCrunch is reporting that four of the companies key product managers have been let go. TechCrunch sees it as the final stage of cleaning out those loyal to the old regime, but it does seem like an odd time to give that many top people the boot.

In recent months, Twitter has been on an upswing with new advertising programs and a new design. Kicking out the key people who made it so, just before a round of new funding feels weird. Is Twitter planning some radical change in the near future, like upping the character count to an even 200!

It appears Facebook is built on a house of cards.

Cards that rely on more than 4,000 MySQL “shards” or should that be sharts?

According to GigaOm:

…Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve.

And, citing database guru Michael Stonebraker…

…Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”

That may sound like an exaggeration, but having lived through this nightmare myself, he may have a point.

Grab some popcorn and pull up a chair because there’s nothing quite like a conspiracy story that involves Facebook hiring a high-profile PR firm to spread a smear campaign about Google to the mainstream media.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

We could stop right there and this would be a juicy enough story, but it gets better. Not only is the company behind this anti-Google media campaign none other than Facebook–pot calling the kettle black, anyone?–but apparently Facebook has admitted it hired Burson-Marsteller to run the negative campaign.

It’s no secret that Twitter has more registered users than actual users. There are stats that say that almost half of the accounts are no longer active. Stats that show how 90% of the Tweets come from 25% of the people and that Twitter’s growth has begun to level off. Add to that, all the internal squabbling and a recent move to block third-party developers and Twitter’s star isn’t shining quite as bright as it used to.

Why? And what now? Fortune has the “why” covered. They’ve just published an extensive article that looks at the history of the company and the roadblocks they’ve faced. If you want all the gory details, it’s a good read.

Here’s what caught my eye;