Biz Stone just announced on the official Twitter blog that Twitter closed a third round of funding led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners last night. We have confirmation from IVP that the round was $35 million, and that Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated.

Stone says the company was not actively looking for additional funding because they haven’t burned through all of the money from the last round. But he was impressed by both of the VCs who led the round (and presumably impressed by some very favorable terms, as well).

Yahoo (YHOO) is announcing several changes to its Search BOSS service, which lets developers incorporate web results from Yahoo’s main search index into their own web apps. The biggest of these changes intends to transform one of Yahoo’s most innovative projects into a real business.

Monday morning Amazon (AMZN) officially announced its second-generation ebook, the Kindle 2 (although leaked photographs of the device have been floating around the internet for some time now).

Yahoo has invited the press to an event in San Francisco today where it will announce the next steps in its open strategy (details found here).

As GigaOm speculated over the weekend, we should be hearing details about the deployment of applications on Yahoo Mail. We’ll post the details here as they become available, starting within the next few minutes.

Not an hour after Google announced the general availability of Friend Connect, Facebook is doing the same for its competing Facebook Connect service. Now any third party website that wants to pull personal data about visitors from Facebook - and send back activity reports to their news feeds - can do so by first filling out a self-service application.

The general availability of Facebook Connect comes only a few days later than our anticipated launch date of November 30th. The service was originally announced last May, just one day after MySpace announced its data portability initiative called Data Availability and just a few days before Google announced Friend Connect.

BusinessWeek discusses Obama’s plan to appoint a cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer for the United States if elected. The CTO would mainly spend his or her time trying to get broadband internet access into more homes (currently, only about 23 out of every 100 Americans have such access, putting the country as a whole at a lousy 15th place among nations). The CTO would also lead a new, $50-billion-dollar venture capital fund for the advancement of green tech.

The names that BusinessWeek floats as potential candidates for the position include Vint Cerf, the chief internet evangelist for Google (GOOG); Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT); Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (AMZN); and Ed Felten, computer science professor at Princeton. Obama’s current campaign advisor Julius Genachowski is also in the running having worked as an executive for IAC (IACI). Lawrence Lessig gets a nod, too, and recognizes the potential importance of such a position; but he has signaled that he’s not interested in filling it.

Facebook’s integration of Microsoft’s Live Search raises two main questions: first, how does Facebook stand to benefit? And second, how does Microsoft (MSFT)? To answer these questions, we must recognize that each company faces its own type of problem and, therefore, stands to benefit uniquely.

Facebook and social networks in general still struggle to prove that they can monetize their vast inventory of pages effectively. When Facebook users browse their friends’ profiles, they tend to pay little or no attention to advertisements - even when those ads reference friends or target the users’ particular interests. In contrast, web searchers are generally more attentive to advertising because they are actually seeking information about the things being advertised. Therefore, adding a dose of search to Facebook should lift overall returns on the site’s advertising efforts.

In a recently published patent, Google (GOOG) describes a vision for an open wireless world, one in which mobile devices (and smartphones in particular) are no longer married to particular cellular service providers.

When you buy a phone in the United States today, you typical have to sign a contract that prevents you from using that phone with more than one provider for a predetermined amount of time. You’ll encounter no such requirement when purchasing a laptop, which can be used to connect to the internet through any service provider at any time.

Yahoo (YHOO) has conducted some rather self-serving research in conjunction with ComScore and Media Contacts that concludes the obvious: Most consumers care intensely about only a small number of websites, and it’s these websites that make for the best places to advertise.

You’ll notice very few ad units while surfing YouTube, and none at all while watching videos contributed by ordinary folk like you or me. The reason? Google (GOOG) fears the legal repercussions of monetizing user generated content that may infringe on somebody else’s copyright.

According to the Brazilian news magazine Exame, Google (GOOG) has made Brazil the center of its Latin American operations, placing former country director Alexandre Hohagen at the helm.

When Phil Schiller, Apple’s (AAPL) senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, introduced MobileMe onstage at the WWDC keynote in June, the audience was wowed into believing that the most stylish hardware and software company had transformed itself into a formidable Internet service provider right before its eyes.

LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures. The investment values the business social network at just over $1 billion.

We reported in early May that Allen & Co was out trying to pitch LinkedIn at that valuation. It turns out the company was not actually working with any bank to get this deal, but it still got a 10-figure valuation anyway.

Yesterday we reported that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s (YHOO) network division, had submitted his resignation. Now we are hearing of two more prominent departures from the beleaguered company.

NYT Bits is reporting the departure of Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and EVP of research and strategic data solutions, which is expected to be officially announced later today. According to the report, Fayyad has been “in charge of mining the terabytes of data collected by the company to improve things like the targeting of ads and content to Yahoo users.”

We’ve got confirmation that CBS (CBS) is going to announce an important partnership with Yahoo (YHOO)  tomorrow morning.

While we don’t yet know exactly what it will entail, we are confident that Yahoo will be joining the CBS Audience Network, which distributes CBS content to destinations such as YouTube, AOL, MSN, Joost, Veoh, Fancast, Bebo, and TVGuide. See a longer list of partners here.

In what can only be interpreted as a move in its extended chess match with Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) has decided to run a two-week-long trial of Google’s (GOOG) AdSense for Search.

The limited test will see Google placing ads alongside no more than 3% of Yahoo’s search result pages in the US. While Yahoo claims to be simply “exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value,” the company is obviously trying to convince shareholders that a merger with Microsoft would be sub-optimal by showing how well an alternative partnership with Google monetizes.

Google (GOOG) may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven’t been contacted by Google.

BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.

Zillow, the site where you can find pricing estimates and other info about houses around the United States, aims to disrupt the online lending market with the launch of its Mortgage Marketplace.

The marketplace is a free service that hooks lenders up with borrowers. It works very much as Zicasso does for travelers (see our review of that service here). Borrowers submit just the essentials - what type of loan they need, where they’re located, their estimated property value, their credit history, etc - without divulging any of their contact info. Then certified lenders make offers that can be compared side-by-side. It’s up to the borrower to reach out and contact those lenders, not the other way around as it is with services like Lending Tree.